... one of the richest, clearest, and acutest surveys to date of the
course of theorizing about myth from the eighteenth century on. I know of no more
useful volume on the topic. Despite the ...postmodern connotations of the title, Von
Hendy is writing not to expose the concept of myth but simply to show the array of
ways in which it has been used from time to time and from place to place. A superb
work. -- Robert A. Segal, University of Lancaster, author of
Theorizing about Myth Andrew Von Hendy offers an integrated
critical account of the career of myth in modernity. He takes as its starting point
some crucial moments in the 18th-century reinvention of the concept and then follows
the major branches of theorizing as they appear in the work of theologians,
philosophers, literary artists, political thinkers, folklorists, anthropologists,
psychologists, and others. Von Hendy pursues each of these four
fundamental strains of theory through the 20th century: the rise of neo-romantic
theories in depth psychology, modernist literature, and later in religious
phenomenology, philosophy, and literary criticism; the establishment of folkloristic
theory in ethnological fieldwork and in classical studies; the growth of ideological
theories from Sorel to Barthes and Derrida; and the recent ascent of constitutive
theories of myth as necessary fiction. Finally, Von Hendy examines the work of five
theorists who attempt to come to terms with the lessons of the ideological critique,
yet regard myth as a constructive phenomenon.
The young people of the Cameroon Grassfields have been subject to a long history of violence and political marginalization. For centuries the main victims of the slave trade, they became prime ...targets for forced labor campaigns under a series of colonial rulers. Today’s youth remain at the bottom of the fiercely hierarchical and polarized societies of the Grassfields, and it is their response to centuries of exploitation that Nicolas Argenti takes up in this absorbing and original book. Beginning his study with a political analysis of youth in the Grassfields from the eighteenth century to the present, Argenti pays special attention to the repeated violent revolts staged by young victims of political oppression. He then combines this history with extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the Oku chiefdom, discovering that the specter of past violence lives on in the masked dance performances that have earned intense devotion from today’s youth. Argenti contends that by evoking the imagery of past cataclysmic events, these masquerades allow young Oku men and women to address the inequities they face in their relations with elders and state authorities today.
Circe Sturm takes a bold and original approach to one of the most highly charged and important issues in the United States today: race and national identity. Focusing on the Oklahoma Cherokee, she ...examines how Cherokee identity is socially and politically constructed, and how that process is embedded in ideas of blood, color, and race. Not quite a century ago, blood degree varied among Cherokee citizens from full blood to 1/256, but today the range is far greater--from full blood to 1/2048. This trend raises questions about the symbolic significance of blood and the degree to which blood connections can stretch and still carry a sense of legitimacy. It also raises questions about how much racial blending can occur before Cherokees cease to be identified as a distinct people and what danger is posed to Cherokee sovereignty if the federal government continues to identify Cherokees and other Native Americans on a racial basis. Combining contemporary ethnography and ethnohistory, Sturm's sophisticated and insightful analysis probes the intersection of race and national identity, the process of nation formation, and the dangers in linking racial and national identities.
Using annual observations on industrial production over the last three centuries, and on GDP over a 100-year period, we seek an historical perspective on the forecastability of these UK output ...measures. The series are dominated by strong upward trends, so we consider various specifications of this, including the local linear trend structural time-series model, which allows the level and slope of the trend to vary. Our results are not unduly sensitive to how the trend in the series is modelled: the average sizes of the forecast errors of all models, and the wide span of prediction intervals, attests to a great deal of uncertainty in the economic environment. It appears that, from an historical perspective, the postwar period has been relatively more forecastable.
Five Ironies of Insurance AARON DOYLE; RICHARD ERICSON
The Appeal of Insurance,
07/2010
Book Chapter
Insurance is the world’s largest industry. Evan Mills recently wrote in the journalSciencethat if insurance was a country, it would have the third biggest economy in the world.¹ Yet the historical ...and contemporary centrality of insurance is mostly neglected by academics. Comparable institutions like the mass media and the criminal justice system have whole subfields of hundreds of social scientists studying them. Yet insurance, while arguably as important, remains all but invisible to us sociologists and other academics, as well as to the public.
A few key social theorists like Germany’s Ulrich Beck² have discussed in broad terms
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This chapter examines the changes in per capita income and productivity from 1800 to modern times. It demonstrates the following: (1) There has been increasing inequality in incomes per capita across ...countries since 1800 despite substantial improvements in the mobility of goods, capital, and technology. (2) The source of this divergence was increasing differences in the efficiency or total factor productivity of economies. (3) These differences in efficiency were not due to the inability of poor countries to get access to the new technologies of the Industrial Revolution. Instead, differences in the efficiency of use of new technologies explain both low levels of income in poor countries and the slow adoption of Western technology. (4) The pattern of trade from the late nineteenth century between the poor and the rich economies should in principle reveal whether the problem of the poor economies was peculiarly a problem of employing labor effectively. A commentary is also included at the end of the chapter.
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