....” If the notion of relativism can be rendered relative unto itself, as the notion of a “comparative” relativism would seem to suggest, then how might one understand its “position” within the kinds of debates in which Smith's paper, by way of commentary, also participates? In particular, if part of Smith's aim...

... and multiplicities, and the other on a world of not-quite repetitions. The article asks if the binary is not essential to the epistemic work that Western (Euro-American) scholars might want to do, since we forever reinvent the divide between the modern and the post-/pre-modern. Strathern assumes the anthropologist's...

..., and the emphasis placed on how splitting open part of patient's body is never a matter of a point of view. But to know exactly what is going on in the operating theater, we might wish to ask how this act speaks to the act of intellectual bifurcation, splitting open what up to then had been a seamless argument...

... of identity, what then might its politics be? By comparing Strathern's Melanesian case with ethnographic examples in Corsica and Mongolia, a novel relational modality of “intensive ethnicity” may be identified, one that differs qualitatively from the “extensive ethnicity” with which anthropologists have...

... and practices are entirely transformative not only of their futures but also of their pasts. Benjamin argued that a work of art is a set of potentials that may or may not be realized in the vicissitudes of its afterlife. The true significance of works might be said, therefore, to emerge only after some as-yet...

... as “we atheists,” by which he seems to have meant “those of us repelled by extravagant or overheated claims and absolutes.” His tendency was thus to pull back in what might seem to be bored alarm from treatments of science as superior, perilous, or in any essential way different from other forms...

...Cary Coglianese; Daniel E. Walters Abstract This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Antipolitics” A considers what it might mean for the administrative state to be antipolitical. Two conceptions of an antipolitical administrative state are identified. The first of these—antipolitics...

..., with regard to ritual and gender‐based religious practices in the Christian West, and with respect to similarities that might be claimed between elements of Christian and non‐Christian cultures. Her thoughts about morphology, materiality, and gender extend beyond medieval Europe to the world at large. Her...

... bands that attacked all who threatened their interests, and the country could not be unified under Tokugawa rule until this activist Buddhism was quelled. The article concludes with an expression of admiration for quietism and a wish that there might be more of it in Buddhism now. Duke University...

... from her African and Aboriginal colleagues, Verran disagrees with Stengers that the only option for science is to make the terms of its defeat explicit. This comment suggests that the sciences might learn from other knowledge traditions in finding the places and the means to develop divergent practices...

... an object for knowledge; nothing can be an object of knowledge until the blur is resolved and clarity attained. Chinese tradition offers suggestive examples of the thought that blur, so far from being incompatible with knowledge, might be its condition of possibility and the explanation of its value...

...Morten Nielsen This article opens with the questions, What is on the inside of a relation? Might we imagine the inner workings of a relational form detached from the elements that it connects? Then, through an ethnographic examination of ancestral interventions among residents in a neighborhood...

... that was inclusive, rather than exclusive, and that understood all boundaries and identities as fluid or blurry, rather than as fixed and immutable. Or one might say that Husain strove to project what Ashis Nandy has called “Indian-style secularism,” celebrating creation, humanity, and beauty in the multiple...

... employed with sensitivity to the situation, privately in the context of the philosophical community, and with due attention to the abilities, vulnerabilities, and needs of the person being corrected, so that he or she might heed the advice given. Modern academics likewise should strive to express...

.... In turn, the verbal discourse tended to render the initial aesthetic judgment more extreme, more polarizing, than it may have felt as a lived response to a specific work of art. To remedy the situation, a viewer might allow feeling to divert the logical course of thinking. © 2013 by Duke University...

... possible posthumanist arguments that might support remaining philosophically uninvolved in these discussions. Duke University Press 2010 Article and Responses How Reliable is Moral Sensitivity? Tzachi Zamir The main topic of Émilie...

... is read as an attempt to imagine these threats and problems and to conceive of how we might think our way beyond them. © 2015 by Duke University Press 2015 nuclear atomic radioactivity risk Lydia Millet Symposium: Peace by Other Means, Part 4 IMAGINING...

... of communities. Demands for harmony are performatively integrated into social practices. The authors argue that, rather than searching for a scale of sociality where harmony might be “organic,” it is necessary to critically assess proclamations of and demands for harmony as means of coercion even within small...

... in Indian politics, such as B. R. Ambedkar, have understood the part that nīti might play for the development of a secular language of politics in modern India. Duke University Press 2008 Symposium: Devalued Currency, Part 3 AN ELEGY FOR NI¯TI Politics as a Secular...

... that don't turn out to be the winning ones. One valuable poetic mode in this period is what we might call the fallen, or disappointed, or misdirected lyric—exemplified most notably by Matthew Prior but also created by a host of other poets (Egerton, Chudleigh, Dixon, Hill, and Swift, for example). “Lost...