The recent discovery of an archive full of personal documents of the philosopher and biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, founder of the General System Theory, paved the way for a reconsideration of important elements concerning his life and thought. This updated biography of a thinker, who is equally often cited as misjudged, takes into consideration all of his publications, his correspondence, as well as the secondary sources devoted to him, and attempts to reveal his richness and complexity to a general reader. This biography thus aims at initiating and promoting a study that is both critical...

Base Encounters explores the social friction that US bases have caused in South Korea, where nearly 30,000 US soldiers remain stationed. Crimes committed in GI entertainment areas have been amplified by an outraged public as both a symbol for and a symptom of the uneven relationship between the United States and the small East Asian nation. Elisabeth Schober s excellent ethnographic history scrutinises these controversial zones of encounter in and near Seoul. Sharing the lives of soldiers, female entertainers, and anti-base activists, she gives a comprehensive introduction to the...

We are living in a new epoch: the Anthropocene, where the world is overheated by human activity, driven too fast and filled too full, uneven and unequal. This collection explores the question of identity in this new world, looking at the consequences of rapidly accelerating change on social and personal identities and providing a concrete set of perspectives on how people conceive their selves and belonging in the twenty-first century. Featuring examinations of the Phiippines, Israel, Australia, the Cape Verde Islands, and Afghanistan, the book studies changes generated by rapid...