1891. The recovered manuscript of Aristotle's Constitutional History of Athens, now for the first time given to the world from the unique text in the British...

Marx was born in 1818, Engels in 1820, both in Germany. Marx's father was a lawyer, and he went to Bonn and Berlin universities, at first to study law, then philosophy (a flourishing subject in German universities at the time). Engels was not a university man. He went into business. From 1850 to 1870 he managed his family's firm's cotton mill in Manchester. Engels had first-hand knowledge of the English capitalists: he was one. After retiring from the cotton industry he (...) lived on in England. From 1849 Marx lived in England, supported by Engels. His political activities had got him into trouble in Germany and in other parts of Europe, and in the 19th century England received many political refugees. Marx worked in the British Museum studying the English economists and writing Capital. He corresponded constantly with Engels, and after Marx's death Engels edited volumes 2 and 3 of.. (shrink)

Bernard d’Abrera’s concise atlas of the world’s butterflies is a beautifully produced book with the most stunning photographs of butterflies that I’ve ever seen. Though not intended as a coffee-table book, it could eminently serve that purpose. D’Abrera himself is a world-renowned butterfly and moth expert at the British Museum (Natural History) in London. Over the years he has produced books on the lepidoptera indigenous to various regions of the world. This book provides a synopsis of his life’s (...) work. (shrink)

이 논문은 상박초간 『주역』 감괘(欽卦)를 중심으로 중국고대 점복문화를 살펴보고 이를 바탕으로 점서였던 『주역』의 경문을 유가가 어떻게 유가 윤리로 만들어갔는가를 밝히고자 하는 것이다. 상박초간 『주역』 감괘는 현행본의 함괘(咸卦)에 해당하며 ‘감(感)’의 뜻으로, 괘 전체의 주제는 남녀 간의 육체적 사랑과 결혼이다. 청화간(淸華簡) 『서법(筮法)』 등 고대의 점술에 남녀 간의 결혼을 점친 예는 상당히 많은데 이런 자료들도 감괘가 단순히 사랑과 결혼에 대한 점술이었다는 것을 증명한다. 상박초간 『주역』과 마왕퇴백서 『주역』의 감괘 효사 및 현행본 함괘 효사를 비교분석해보면 상박초간본 → 마왕퇴본 → 현행본으로 변해가는 모습을 찾아볼 수 있다. (...) 이는 『주역』 텍스트가 많은 변화를 거쳐 현재의 모습으로 이루어졌음을 보여주는 증거다. 한편 『순자』 「대략(大略)」편, 현행본 『주역』 「단전(彖傳)」은 함괘의 주제를 남녀 간의 사랑과 결혼에서 추상화하여 부부의 도, 나아가 음양 ‘이기(二氣)’의 철학으로 확대한다. 이러한 확대는 결국 자연철학 방면으로는 세계, 우주를 구성하는 ‘이기’의 감응에 의한 만물생성론을, 인간사회 방면으로는 성인의 감화를 통한 천하화평을 주장하는 데에까지 나아간다. 「서괘전」도 함괘를 ‘부부의 도리’로 보고 이에 기초하여 부자, 군신, 상하, 예의로까지 확대시킨다. 「서괘전」이 함괘를 서술할 때 ‘남녀’가 아닌 ‘하늘과 땅’으로 시작하고 있는 것은 「단전」의 논의를 바탕에 두고 있기 때문이다. 이처럼 우주적 질서에서 시작하여 인간의 예의로 귀결을 맺는 것은 철저한 유가적 사유로, 따라서 「서괘전」이 만들어진 시점에서 『주역』의 유교경전화는 이미 완성되어 있었다고 생각된다. (shrink)

Our texts of the two complete extant works of Gorgias and of the two attributed, rightly or wrongly, to Alkidamas are derived entirely from two manuscripts. The one generally known as A is the Cripps manuscript , now in the British Museum, which is a principal authority also for Antiphon, Andokides, Isaios, Lykourgos, and Deinarchos; it contains Helen, Palamedes, and Odysseus, but not On Sophists. The other, known as X, is the Palatine manuscript , which is the (...) principal manuscript of Lysias; it contains Helen Odysseus, and On Sophists, but not Palamedes. (shrink)

Please send the completed questionnaire by October 1, 2005 either electronically to Vincent F. Hendricks (vincent@ruc.dk) or John Symons (jsymons@utep.edu) or mail (fax) to Vincent F. Hendricks, Dept. of Philosophy and Science Studies, Roskilde University, DK4000 Roskilde, Denmark, Fax: +45 4674 3012..

Dept of Business Administration Dept of Computer and Knowledge Systems Group University of Patras Information Science School of Computer Science 265 00 Patras, Greece Brooklyn College of the and Engineering ppeppas@otenet.gr City University of New York University of New South Wales Brooklyn, NY 11210, USA Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia schopra@sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu norman@cse.unsw.edu.au..

Parental environmental education in early childhood is vital for nurturing environmental awareness and ecological protection. This study investigates how parents’ nature engagement methods influence children’s environmental awareness and participation in protection activities. Using the Bayesian Mindsponge Framework with data from 516 children and their primary caregivers across 23 elementary summer schools in five urban Chinese cities, the findings reveal varying impacts of parental engagement methods. Raising animals and plants is positively associated with environmental awareness (moderate reliability) and protection activities (high (...) reliability). Visiting museums about endangered and extinct species enhances children’s environmental awareness, while learning about insects and their habits improves their participation in protection activities (both high reliability). However, outdoor learning experiences and playing in natural environments (e.g., parks and forests) show ambiguous effects. These results underscore the value of family-centered environmental education, emphasizing the crucial roles of direct nature interactions and providing actionable insights for child-focused environmental policies. (shrink)

The early abolition of serfdom in England, the early growth of relatively free institutions, and the greater recognition of popular claims after the decay of feudalism had divorced the masses from the soil, were traits of English life which may be looked back upon with pride. When it was decided that any slave who set foot in England became free; when the importation of slaves into the Colonies was stopped; when twenty millions were paid for the emancipation of slaves in (...) the West Indies; and when, however unadvisedly, a fleet was maintained to stop the slave trade; our countrymen did things worthy to be admired. And when England gave a home to political refugees and took up the causes of small states struggling for freedom, it again exhibited noble traits which excite affection. But there are traits, unhappily of late more frequently displayed, which do the reverse. Contemplation of the acts by which England has acquired over eighty possessions – settlements, colonies, protectorates, &c. – does not arouse feelings of satisfaction. The transitions from missionaries to resident agents, then to officials having armed forces, then to punishments of those who resist their rule, ending in so called “pacification” – these processes of annexation, now gradual and now sudden, as that of the new Indian province and that of Barotziland, which was declared a British colony with no more regard for the wills of the inhabiting people than for those of the inhabiting beasts – do not excite sympathy with their perpetrators. Love of country is not fostered in me on remembering that when, after our Prime Minister had declared that we were bound in honour to the Khedive to reconquer the Soudan, we, after the re conquest, forthwith began to administer it in the name of the Queen and the Khedive – practically annexing it; nor when, after promising through the mouths of two Colonial Ministers not to interfere in the internal affairs of the Transvaal, we proceeded to insist on certain electoral arrangements, and made resistance the excuse for a desolating war.. (shrink)

For some decades now, British cultural studies has tended to either disregard or caricature in a hostile manner the critique of mass culture developed by the Frankfurt school. [1] The Frankfurt school has been repeatedly stigmatized as elitist and reductionist, or simply ignored in discussion of the methods and enterprise of cultural studies. This is an unfortunate oversight as I will argue that despite some significant differences in method and approach, there are also many shared positions that make dialogue (...) between the traditions productive. Likewise, articulation of the differences and divergences of the two traditions could be fruitful since, as I will argue, both traditions to some extent overcome the weaknesses and limitations of the other. Consequently, articulation of their positions could produce new perspectives that might contribute to developing a more robust cultural studies. Thus, I will argue that rather than being antithetical, the Frankfurt school and British cultural studies approaches complement each other and can be articulated in new configurations. (shrink)

Marilyn Strathern’s arguments against the possibility of feminist research bringing about a paradigm shift in social anthropology have led to a number of responses. Regarding one argument she presents, her own writings suggest a response: the argument that feminist research cannot bring about such a shift, because it is only concerned with part of society. A foray into the history of British social anthropology is of value for appreciating this argument and the response.

This paper presents a proposal for how British structural-functionalist anthropology can cope with some change. It may not seem a very sensible proposal, but I think it needs to be registered. I use a structure of universities in a country to illustrate the proposal.

‘What distinguishes science from all other human endeavours is that the accounts of the world that our best, mature sciences deliver are strongly supported by evidence and this evidence gives us the strongest reason to believe them.’ That anyway is what is said at the beginning of the advertisement for a conference on induction at a celebrated British seat of learning in 2007. It shows how much critical rationalists still have to do to make known the message of Logik (...) der Forschung concerning what empirical evidence is able to do and what it does. (shrink)

Contemporary theories of justice frequently suppose that a legitimate state does not coerce people to comply with values or principles that they could reasonably reject. This ideal of legitimacy is thought to imply neutrality on the good: The State should not coerce people to comply with controversial conceptions of the good (which people could reasonably reject). As Ronald Dworkin puts the point, the government's policies should “be neutral on the question of the good life, or of what gives value to (...) life." Liberal neutrality is sometimes described as a generalization of policies of religious tolerance: Just as the state should be neutral with respect to religious questions, so too the state should be neutral with respect to questions about the good life.". (shrink)

I address the problem that British social anthropologists ignored the wider colonial relations which the societies they studied were part of, by proposing a solution from reflecting on the structure of European intellectual cults.

British structural-functionalist anthropology famously faces an objection that it is incapable of dealing with the influence of wider processes. An analytical response to this objection, which at least needs to be registered, is that some wider processes can be ignored when there is causal overdetermination.

Seattle, the city where I live, teach, and do physics research, is the home of Paul Allen’s new Science Fiction Museum (SFM), located in the Experience Music Project building at Seattle Center, in the shadow of the Space Needle. The SFM is well worth a visit, offering a fascinating display of collected TV and movie props (e.g., Captain Kirk’s Chair from Star Trek ), SF memorabilia, and treasured books and manuscripts from the classic works of science fiction. In (...) early December 2005, Stephen Hawking was on a fund-raising tour in celebration of.. (shrink)

This is a one page handout, which specifies four uses of the social organism analogy in British structural-functionalist anthropology and contrasts these uses with uses in analytic political philosophy.

This is the commentary on John Baker, "H. P. Grice's Construction of Value", read at the 34th Annual Congress of the Canadian Philosophical Association, May 1990, Victoria, British Columbia.

Three separate churches erected in Constantinople were all dedicated to the wisdom of Christ and erected on the same site one after the other. These churches were built between 360 and 537 AD by three different emperors: Constantius II, Theodosius the Younger, and Justinian I. The first two churches were consumed in flames after relatively short lives, but the final and greatest church still stands today, despite a history of extensive damage. This final edifice is the main focus of this (...) paper, owing to its 1500 year longevity and unprecedented architecture. If the entire History of Justinian's church is to considered, it is inaccurate to refer to it as a “church,” because although it remained a church for the first 900 years after its audacious construction, it was later converted into a mosque. Today it is a museum, in remembrance of its long history. (24). (shrink)

Diaristic, mixed notes on: John Ruskin's The Poetry of Architecture (1837) and Modern Painters (1885); Caravaggio, Victorian Aesthetes, G.K. Chesterton, and Tacita Dean; Jay Fellows' Ruskin’s Maze: Mastery and Madness in His Art (1981); Slavoj Žižek at Jack Tilton Gallery, New York, New York, USA, April 23, 2009, “Architectural Parallax: Spandrels and Other Phenomena of Class Struggle”; “Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice”, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, March 15-August 16, 2009; Janet Harbord, Chris Marker: La (...) Jetée (2009); The Politics of the Envelope, Princeton Envelope Group (PEG), ARC504, Princeton School of Architecture, Princeton, New Jersey, USA, Friday, May 8, 2009; Rhode Island School of Design, Degree Project Reviews, Division of Architecture & Design, Providence, Rhode Island, USA, May 16, 2009; etc. (shrink)

In this paper, I respond to the infamous letter to The Times warning the University of Cambridge against awarding Jacques Derrida an honorary degree. I draw attention to an assumption of that letter.

Essay on the modern artistic ego as sponsored by the exhibition, "Gustav Courbet," February 27-May 18, 2008, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, USA. A version of this essay appeared in Gavin Keeney, "Else-where": Essays on Art, Architecture, and Cultural Production 2002-2011 (CSP, 2011), pp. 191-98.

Essays and documents surveying the post-communist architectural scene in the Czech Republic. - 1/ “Wild & Wilder” (1997) – A brief travelogue with comments on Kew Gardens, London, and Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat (1930), Brno. 2/ “Angel City” (1999) – A short report on Jean Nouvel’s Golden Angel office tower in Smíchov, Prague. 3/ “Read & Weep: Scandal in Bohemia” (1999) – Essay on post-communist machinations within the architectural scene in the Czech Republic, including reports on: Jean Nouvel’s (...) Angel City and its critics; charges of “lite (postmodern) neo-functionalism” here and there; a cooked “open” competition for a proposed Kupka museum in an old mill on the island of Kampa (in the Vltava); a tourist-dodging transit through Josip Plečnik’s gardens at Prague Castle; and stories and legends regarding the Star Pavilion and oak wood at White Mountain. 4/ “The Body of the City” (2001) – Critique of Richard Meier and Partners’ proposed ECM Radio Plaza, a series of towers meant to complete an unfinished, communist-era “Rockefeller Center” in the Pankrác district of Prague. 5/ “Gnomic Works: The Sculptural Works of Kurt Gebauer” (2002) – Essay on the sculpture of Czech artist Kurt Gebauer with images from his exhibition in Zlín in 2001. 6/ “House of the Wind: May Day” (2004) – Prose poem written on May Day 2004 regarding wandering around Olšanské hřbitovy, a mostly 19th-century cemetery in the Žižkov district of Prague. 7/ “Architectural Eyewash” (2004) – An essay surveying: various complaints within the Czech architectural community regarding an outbreak of “architectural eyewash” in the 2004 Chamber of Architects’ Grand Prix competition; rumors and innuendo regarding a proposed Kupka museum on Kampa; complaints about Daniel Libeskind’s proposed Dalí House, Prague; etc. 8/ “Moravian Shadows” (2004) – Essay on “cultural shadows” in the context of Czech architecture, with a nod to Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy. 9/ The Near & The Far: Moravian Garden (2006) – Notes and discursuses on a very small, yet “immense” South Moravian country garden in Skryje, Czech Republic. (shrink)

According to the legend, Bishop Wilberforce at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Oxford on Saturday, June 30th, 1860, turned to Thomas Huxley, and asked him ``Is it on your grandfather's or your grandmother's side that you claim descent from a monkey''; whereupon Huxley delivered a devastating rebuke, thereby establishing the primacy of scientific truth over ecclesiastical obscurantism. Although the legend is historically untrue in almost every detail, its persistence suggests that it may (...) nonetheless be true in some deeper, mythical, sense. To explore this possibility the British Academy has invited Dr Janet Browne to be a neo-Huxley confronting Mr J.R. Lucas, as a neo-Wilberforce, with each reconsidering their earlier arguments. (shrink)

words express the sentiment which sways the British nation in its dealings with the Boer republics; and this sentiment it is which, definitely displayed in this case, pervades indefinitely the political feeling now manifesting itself as Imperialism. Supremacy, where not clearly imagined, is vaguely present in the background of consciousness. Not the derivation of the word only, but all its uses and associations, imply the thought of predominance – imply a correlative subordination. Actual or potential coercion of others, individuals (...) or communities, is necessarily involved in the conception. (shrink)

A -/- abortion and infanticide/ academic freedom/ academics/ action/ act-omission doctrine/ addiction and dependence/ adoption/ advertising/ affirmative action/ age of consent/ age of criminal responsibility/ age of majority/ agent/ aggression/ agriculture/ aid, foreign/ AIDS/ air/ akrasia/ allies/ altruism/ American Civil War (1861-1865)/ American exceptionalism/ American War of Independence (1775–1783)/ anarchic social order/ anarcho-capitalism/ anarchy/ animal rights/ animal welfare/ apartheid/ apathy/ appeasement/ apriorism/ aristocracy/ arms trade/ arms race/ artificial intelligence/ arts and sciences/ assassination/ asset stripping/ asylum seekers/ atomism, social/ Austrian School (...) of economics/ authoritarianism/ authority/ autonomy, intellectual/ axis/ -/- B -/- balance of trade/ balance of power (international)/ banking/ bankruptcy, insolvency, and limited liability/ barriers to entry/ begging/ belief/ betting/ big business/ bigotry/ biodiversity/ bioethics/ black market/ blackmail/ blasphemy/ booms and slumps/ borders, political/ boxing and dangerous sports/ boycott/ bribery/ British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)/ BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy)/ bureaucracy/ business cycles/ . (shrink)

Although the economic thought of Marshall and Pigou was united by ethical positions broadly considered utilitarian, differences in their intellectual milieu led to degrees of difference between their respective philosophical visions. This change in milieu includes the influence of the little understood period of transition from the early idealist period in Great Britain, which provided the context to Marshall’s intellectual formation, and the late British Idealist period, which provided the context to Pigou’s intellectual formation. During this latter period, the (...) pervading Hegelianism and influences of naturalism arising from the ideas of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer were challenged by Hermann Lotze, a key transitional thinker influencing the Neo-Kantian movement, who recognised significant limits of naturalism, on the one hand, and the metaphysical tenor of absolute idealism, on the other, and attempted to provide a balance between the two. The goal of this paper is to make the provisional case for the argument that Pigou’s views on ethics were not only directly influenced by utilitarian thinkers like Mill and Sidgwick, but they were also indirectly influenced by Hermann Lotze, via the influence of the Neo- Kantian movement on late British idealism. To that end, Pigou’s essays in The Trouble with Theism (1908), including his sympathetic consideration of the ethics of Friedrich Nietzsche, reflect the influence of Lotze indirectly through the impact at Cambridge of: James Ward’s critique of associationist psychology, and consideration of the limits of naturalism including the critique of evolutionary ethics; Bertrand Russell’s rejection of neo-Hegelianism and, together with Alfred North Whitehead, the development of Logicism; and G.E. Moore’s critique of utilitarian ethics on the basis of the naturalistic fallacy and the development of his own intuitionist system of ethics. (shrink)

This is an excerpt from a report on the Sensory Substitution and Augmentation Conference at the British Academy in March of 2013. This portion of the report explores the question: Does sensory substitution generate perceptual or cognitive states?

This is an excerpt from a report on the Sensory Substitution and Augmentation Conference at the British Academy in March of 2013. This portion of the report explores the question: How does sensory substitution interact with the brain’s architecture?

In _The Mind and its Place in Nature_ , C.D. Broad tries to show, as he says (p. 59), that "there is no doubt" that the Theory of Emergence is a logically possible view with a good deal in its favor. And in his history of British Emergentism, McLaughlin states that emergentism is perfectly internally coherent, although he doesn't think it has any empirical evidence in its favor at present. I am inclined to agree with the assessment that emergentism (...) is a coherent theory, but I can't see that Broad or McLaughlin has shown this, at least if this is taken to mean that it represents a metaphysical possibility (and not merely is not self-contradictory). Moreover, I suspect many people find the concept of emergent properties somehow unscientific, mysterious, and possibly incoherent; and I doubt that Broad has adequately addressed this intuition. He has indeed admirably explicated the meaning of the theory, so that now we can all understand it; but just as even to explain the idea, for example, that there are alterations without causes in such a way that it becomes absolutely, crystal clear what one means by "an uncaused change" would not be to demonstrate. (shrink)

Suppose you take a tour of the Louvre, that great museum in Paris housing one of the finest art collections in the world. As you walk through the museum, you come across a painting by someone named Leonardo da Vinci -- the Mona Lisa. Suppose this is your first exposure to da Vinci -- you hadn't heard of him or seen the Mona Lisa before. What could you conclude? Certainly you could conclude that da Vinci was a consummate (...) painter. Nevertheless, just from the Mona Lisa you couldn't conclude that da Vinci was also a consummate engineer, musician, scientist, and inventor, whose ideas were centuries ahead of their time. (shrink)

Must we choose between reducing material substances to collections of properties, a’ la Berkeley and Hume or positing bare particulars, in the manner of Locke? Having repudiated the notion that a substance could simply be a collection of properties existing on their own, is there a viable alternative to the Lockean notion of a substratum, a being essentially devoid of character? E.J. Lowe and Michael Loux would answer here in the affirmative. Both recommend hylomorphism as an upgrade on the metaphysics (...) of the British empiricists: treating a material substance as its essential 'form,' this embodied 'substance' universal being, in turn, the substratum in which its 'accidents' inhere. Here, I evaluate this Aristotelian metaphysics, identifying the advantages it enjoys over the empiricist's alternatives pertaining to dependence, unity, identity, change, and the distinction between essential and accidental properties. I also develop solutions to the two problems that Loux sees it posing. (shrink)

According to evolutionist Francisco Ayala, Darwin’s greatest achievement was to show that the organized complexity of living things could be brought about without recourse to a designing intelligence. Given this view of Darwin’s achievement, what evolutionary biology has come to mean by “evolution” is an unintelligent or blind form of it. This was brought home to me two years ago at a debate in which I participated. I was invited, along with my colleague and friend Michael Behe, to debate Darwinists (...) Kenneth Miller and Robert Pennock at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. The debate was initially titled “Blind Evolution or Intelligent Design?” Yet, when the debate actually took place on April 23, 2002, the program bulletin distributed at the event quietly dropped the word “blind” and titled the debate simply “Evolution or Intelligent Design?” The original title was more accurate. Intelligent design, the view for which Behe and I were arguing, is opposed to blind evolution, not to evolution simpliciter. (shrink)

Spacetime, International Research Library of Philosophy, Dartmouth Publishing, 1996. From Physics to Philosophy, C.U.P., 1999. The Arguments of Time, British Academy and O.U.P., 1999. Non-Locality and Modality, Kluwer Academic, 2002. Quantum Entanglements, Selected Papers of Rob Clifton, O.U.P., 2004.

Sokal and Bricmont in their exposé of allegedly meaningless statements about science by recent French philosophers take errors of particular applications of philosophical ideas to science as refutations of the whole general framework utilized. They also seem to think that taking snippets out of context is sufficient to expose the "fashionable nonsense." In the early twentieth century, British analytic philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and A. N. Whitehead did the same with Hegel on mathematics. After deciding not to bother (...) to read Hegel because of distaste for what he wrote about mathematics, Whitehead was later surprised to learn that his own relational process philosophy resembled that of Hegel in various respects. (shrink)

As an undergraduate from 1964 to 1967, Gareth Evans, a British philosopher of language and mind, studied for the PPE degree (philosophy, politics and economics) at University College, Oxford, where his philosophy tutor was Peter Strawson. He was then a Senior Scholar at Christ Church, Oxford (1967–68) and a Kennedy Scholar visiting Harvard and Berkeley (1968–69). In 1968, less than a year after completing his degree, Evans was elected to a Fellowship at University College. He took up the position (...) in 1969, succeeding Strawson who had become Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford. During the 1970s, Evans and his University College colleague John McDowell played leading roles in developing a distinctive conception of truth-theoretic semantics, drawing on the work of Strawson, Michael Dummett, and especially Donald Davidson. Their co-edited collection, Truth and Meaning: Essays in Semantics, appeared in 1976. While philosophy of language enjoyed a central position in Oxford philosophy of that period, Evans did not share the view (regarded by Dummett as constitutive of analytic philosophy) that philosophy of language is foundational and so takes priority over philosophy of mind in the order of philosophical explanation. He attached particular importance to the mentalistic notion of understanding, and his work on the theory of reference was set within a theory of thought and especially thought about particular objects. Evans’s published work ranged over philosophy of language, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of psychology. In 1979 he was elected to the Wilde Readership in Mental Philosophy at Oxford. He died in August 1980, at the age of thirtyfour. His book, The Varieties of Reference (1982), incomplete at the time of his death, was edited and brought to publication by McDowell. A collection of thirteen of his papers and two shorter notes appeared in 1985 and a further note was published in 2004.. (shrink)

English manuscript version of Afterword to German translation of Victor Turner's The Ritual Process. The Ritual Process is a pivotal book in the body of Victor Turner's works. The first three chapters, drawn from Turner's Henry Morgan lectures at the University of Rochester, reveal the richness and subtlety of his analysis of tribal ritual and social life. In the third chapter, he concentrates on the aspects of liminality and communitas found in Ndembu ritual and expands these in the remainder of (...) the book to universal categories of human experience. His masterful ethnography opens up to reveal the fundamental reality of the subjunctive mood in human affairs: the ritual process. In Turner's analyses of the Isoma and Wubwang'a rituals of the Ndembu of Northwestern Zambia, one sees the fantastic interplay between human affliction and symbolic renewal, between human communities and a natural environment teeming with signification. The Ndembu are revealed to be a people with a deep appreciation of the complexity of existence, and endowed with a sophisticated technics of meaning, a vast architectonic of felt, expressive forms through which to journey to those borderlands beyond human comprehensibility: death, the dead, the call of the mother-line, fecundity, transformation, the interstices of social structure. Turner reveals himself to be an initiate, not only to the rites revealed to him by the Ndembu, but to the centrality of ritual itself in tribal society and human affairs. Trained in the British structural-functionalist approach to social anthropology, Turner notes how the incessant call of the drums made him feel that he "was always on the outside looking in." Soon, however, Turner and his wife and collaborator Edith discarded their theoretical ear-plugs and answered the invitation of the drums. As observers and co-participants in Ndembu ritual the Turners' began to blaze a trail toward a new anthropology. (shrink)