Human liberation has become an epochal challenge in today's world, requiring not only emancipation from oppressive structures but also from the oppressive self. It is a multidimensional struggle and aspiration in which knowledge - self, social and spiritual - can play a transformative role. 'Knowledge and Human Liberation: Towards Planetary Realizations' undertakes such a journey of transformation, and seeks to rethink knowledge vis-a-vis the familiar themes of human interest, critical theory, enlightenment, ethnography, democracy, pluralism, rationality, secularism and...

This collection of essays incorporates the insight of an international group of experts to explore the impact of neoliberal ideology upon political, social and economic domains, as well as institutions such as the prison, healthcare and education systems and the voluntary sector. Examining the effects of the emergence of late-modern capitalism in the 1970s, the articles look at how the reaction against post-war Keynesian ideology manifested itself in each of these areas. This neoliberal resurgence has been characterised by competition and free markets, individual and family responsibility,...

The individual has never been more important in society in almost every sphere of public and private life, the individual is sovereign. Yet the importance and apparent power assigned to the individual is not all that it seems. As Responsible Citizens investigates via its UK-based case studies, this emphasis on the individual has gone hand in hand with a rise in subtle authoritarianism, which has insinuated itself into the government of the population. Whilst present throughout the public services, this authoritarianism is most conspicuous in the health and social welfare sectors, such that...

This collection of original essays examines the complex historical relationships between religion, war and peace. Taking Tolstoy's famous novel as its title, the book is divided into two sections. In the first, four chapters explore examples of religion and violence. These include a famous case of violence against Polish Jews by their neighbors, messianic movements in West Papua in response to external cultural and military threats, the American Protestant response to the violence of the Civil War and the ultimate defeat of the Confederate forces, and finally the religion and violence...

Recovering a lost world of the politics of science in Imperial Germany, Gregory B. Moynahan revisits the work of the philosopher and historian Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) and explores his relations with the Marburg School of Hermann Cohen. "Ernst Cassirer and the Critical Science of Germany, 1899-1919" covers the epochal transformations of the natural sciences at the turn of the century, and reveals Cassirer's view of an emergent mode of understanding based purely on relational structure which, he perceived, could be applied fruitfully to the social sciences and humanities, or human...

'Ageing, Corporeality and Embodiment' argues that both ageing as a unitary social process and agedness as a distinct social location have become fragmented. The book concentrates on the emergence of a 'new ageing' mediated in part through the processes of 'embodiment'.

The first section provides the main theoretical context for the book, with the first chapter outlining the new 'sociology of the body' and the second outlining the emergence of new ageing and its 're-orientation' toward the body. The second section explores the relationship between new ageing and key aspects of...

Fighting Scholars brings to the fore the ethnographic study of combat sports and martial arts as a means of exploring embodied human existence. The book s main claim is that such activities represent privileged grounds to access different social dimensions, such as emotion, violence, pain, gender, ethnicity and religion. In order to explore these dimensions, the concept of habitus is presented prominently as an epistemic remedy for the academic distant gaze of the effaced academic body. The different contributions of this volume are aligned within the same project that began to...

Anthropology and philosophy have long been intellectual companions; the borders between the two disciplines have always been permeable. For example, anthropologies inspired by Durkheim are ultimately indebted to Kant; Evans-Pritchard's ideas are stamped with R. G. Collingwood's Hegelian philosophy; Gluckman was stimulated by Whitehead's process philosophy; and Bourdieu drew inspiration from Wittgenstein and Pascal, amongst others. Yet the fuller history and implications of philosophical influences in anthropology are largely unaddressed.

In this volume, the contributors address the...

The contemporary importance of A. N. Whitehead (1861-1947) lies in his direct yet productive challenge to the culture of thought inherent in modernity, a challenge that suffuses science, social theory and philosophy alike. Unlike some of the more destructive aspects of postmodernism and poststructuralism, Whitehead's diagnosis of the conceptual fault lines of the modern era does not entail a passive relativism. Instead, he calls for a renewal of our concepts, offering a positive, philosophical approach based on becoming, relativity, and a reconception of subjectivity and the social. This...

The individual has never been more important in society in almost every sphere of public and private life, the individual is sovereign. Yet the importance and apparent power assigned to the individual is not all that it seems. As Responsible Citizens investigates via its UK-based case studies, this emphasis on the individual has gone hand in hand with a rise in subtle authoritarianism, which has insinuated itself into the government of the population. Whilst present throughout the public services, this authoritarianism is most conspicuous in the health and social welfare sectors, such that...