Fear and Fortune: Spirit Worlds and Emerging Economies in the Mongolian Gold Rush
Author: Mette M. High File Type: pdf Mongolia over the last decade has seen a substantial and ongoing gold rush. The widespread mining of gold looks at first glance to be a blessing for a desperately poor and largely pastoralist country where peoples lives were disrupted by the end of the USSR and tens of millions of livestock were killed in devastating droughts in the early 2000s. Volatility and uncertainty as well as political and economic turmoil led many people to join the hopeful search for gold. This activity, born out of uncertain times, poses an intense moral problem in the land of dust, disturbing the ground and extracting the precious metal is widely believed to have calamitous consequences. With gold retaining strong ties to the landscape and its many spirit beings, the fortune of the precious metal is inseparable from the fears that surround mining. Tracing the continuities and discontinuities between human and nonhuman worlds, Mette M. High follows the paths of gold as it is excavated and converted into polluted money, entering local shops and Buddhist monasteries, joining the illegal gold trade, and returning as renewed money for the big bosses of the gold mines. High has done several years of fieldwork in Mongolia, spending time with the ninjas, as the miners are known locally, as well as the people who disapprove of their illegal activities and warn of the retribution that the land and its inhabitants may suffer as a result. This book is about radical change, or as many Mongolians put it, when life becomes strange and chaotic. High has gained a deep understanding of the processes by which Mongolians square a morally questionable activity with the lure of profit. How do they involve themselves with tainted sources of money, and can it ever be cleansed and made usable? Addressing how our lives and those of others are intimately intertwined, Fear and Fortune offers an expansive and capacious approach to understanding the high stakes involved in human economic life. **Review Fear and Fortune is an important and timely ethnographic account of the Mongolian gold rush. Not only does it make a useful contribution to the burning issue of the environmental, social, and cultural consequences of mining economies, but it does so in an accessible and engaging style, rendering peoples daily lives with an intimate yet tactful touch.Gregory Delaplace, coeditor of Frontier Encounters Fear and Fortune is a well-crafted, highly accessible, and very attractive read on the Mongolian gold rush and the spirit forces that underpin it. Mette M. High fully succeeds in drawing in and keeping the readers attention while presenting her findings at a brisk pace. She offers up some highly original discussions of what money constitutes in a part of the world where the same value is neither consistently nor automatically attributed to the national currency. Mongolians conceptualize, handle, and transact money in ways that fall outside of the usual expectations surrounding it. High enables us to have a uniquely up close and personal view onto gold mining and its international circuitry, based on a sensitive study of Mongolian sociality, miners, religious knowledge and practice, and ways of envisioning and experiencing what counts as value in the Mongolian gold rush today.Katherine Swancutt, author of Fortune and the Cursed
Author: Amanda Hopkins
File Type: pdf
This volume examines the erotic in the literature of medieval Britain, primarily in Middle English, but also in Latin, Welsh and Old French. Seeking to discover the nature of the erotic and how it differs from modern erotics, the contributors address topics such as the Wife of Baths opinions on marital eroticism, the role of clothing and nudity, the tension between eroticism and transgression, the interplay between religion and the erotic, and the hedonistic horrors of the cannibalistic Giant of Mont St Michel. Contributors ALEX DAVIS, SIMON MEECHAM-JONES, JANE BLISS, SUE NIEBRZYDOWSKI, KRISTINA HILDEBRAND, ANTHONY BALE, CORY JAMES RUSHTON, CORINNE SAUNDERS, AMANDA HOPKINS, ROBERT ROUSE, MARGARET ROBSON, THOMAS H. CROFTS III, MICHAEL CICHON. AMANDA HOPKINS teaches in the department of English and Comparative Literary Studies and the department of French at the University of Warwick. CORY RUSHTON is in the Department of English at St. Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia, Canada.ReviewA multiplicity of perspectives on a discreet (yet vast) number of texts, many of which are romances, that lends a sense of completeness to the book as a whole. COMITATUS
Author: Jonathan Haidt
File Type: mobi
span normalThe bestselling author of The Righteous Mind draws on philosophical wisdom and scientific research to show how the meaningful life is closer than you thinkThe Happiness Hypothesis is a book about ten Great Ideas. Each chapter is an attempt to savor one idea that has been discovered by several of the worlds civilizations--to question it in light of what we now know from scientific research, and to extract from it the lessons that still apply to our modern lives and illuminate the causes of human flourishing. Award-winning psychologist Jonathan Haidt, the author of The Righteous Mind, shows how a deeper understanding of the worlds philosophical wisdom and its enduring maxims--like do unto others as you would have others do unto you, or what doesnt kill you makes you stronger--can enrich and even transform our lives.span
Author: Arkady Strugatsky
File Type: epub
Amazing. . . . The Strugatskys deft and supple handling of loyalty and greed, of friendship and love, of despair and frustration and loneliness [produces] a truly superb tale. . . . You wont forget it -Theodore Sturgeon Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those young rebels who are compelled, in spite of the extreme danger, to venture illegally into the Zone to collect the mysterious artifacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. But when he and his friend Kirill go into the Zone together to pick up a full empty something goes terribly wrong. . . . First published in 1972 and immediately acclaimed as a science-fiction classic, Roadside Picnic is included on almost every list of the hundred greatest science-fiction novels, despite the fact that it has been out of print in the United States for almost thirty years. It was the basis for Andrei Tarkovskys filmic masterpiece Stalker and the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video games that have proven immensely popular. This brand new translation corrects many of the errors and omissions of the previous one. Finally, one of the greatest science fiction novels-and one of the most popular pieces of Russian fiction-is back in print in an authoritative version. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are the most famous and popular Russian writers of science fiction. Their books have been widely translated and have been made into a number of films. Arkady died in 1991 Boris lives in St. Petersburg. **
Author: Amy Cox Hall
File Type: pdf
When Hiram Bingham, a historian from Yale University, first saw Machu Picchu in 1911, it was a ruin obscured by overgrowth whose terraces were farmed a by few families. A century later, Machu Picchu is a UNESCO world heritage site visited by more than a million tourists annually. This remarkable transformation began with the photographs that accompanied Binghams article published in National Geographic magazine, which depicted Machu Picchu as a lost city discovered. Focusing on the practices, technologies, and materializations of Binghams three expeditions to Peru (1911, 1912, 19141915), this book makes a convincing case that visualization, particularly through the camera, played a decisive role in positioning Machu Picchu as both a scientific discovery and a Peruvian heritage site.Amy Cox Hall argues that while Binghams expeditions relied on the labor, knowledge, and support of Peruvian elites, intellectuals, and peasants, the practice of scientific witnessing, and photography specifically, converted Machu Picchu into a cultural artifact fashioned from a distinct way of seeing. Drawing on science and technology studies, she situates letter writing, artifact collecting, and photography as important expeditionary practices that helped shape the way we understand Machu Picchu today. Cox Hall also demonstrates that the photographic evidence was unstable, and, as images circulated worldwide, the lost city took on different meanings, especially in Peru, which came to view the site as one of national patrimony in need of protection from expeditions such as Binghams.
Author: Victor Klemperer
File Type: epub
Munich 1919 is a vivid portrayal of the chaos that followed World War I and the collapse of the Munich Council Republic by one of the most perceptive chroniclers of German history. Victor Klemperer provides a moving and thrilling account of what turned out to be a decisive turning point in the fate of a nation, for the revolution of 1918-9 not only produced the first German democracy, it also heralded the horrors to come. With the directness of an educated and independent young man, Klemperer turned his hand to political journalism, writing astute, clever and linguistically brilliant reports in the beleaguered Munich of 1919. He sketched intimate portraits of the people of the hour, including Erich Muhsam, Max Levien and Kurt Eisner, and took the measure of the events around him with a keen eye. These observations are made ever more poignant by the inclusion of passages from his later memoirs. In the midst of increasing persecution under the Nazis he reflected on the fateful year 1919, the growing threat of antisemitism, and the acquaintances he made in the period, some of whom would later abandon him, while others remained loyal. Klemperers account once again reveals him to be a fearless and deeply humane recorder of German history. Munich 1919 will be essential reading for all those interested in 20th century history, constituting a unique witness to events of the period.
Author: Mark Andrejevic
File Type: pdf
Today, more mediated information is available to more people than at any other time in human history. New and revitalized sense-making strategies multiply in response to the challenges of cutting through the clutter of competing narratives and taming the avalanche of information. Data miners, sentiment analysts, and decision markets offer to help bodies of data speak for themselvesmaking sense of their own patterns so we dont have to. Neuromarketers and body language experts promise to peer behind peoples words to see what their brains are really thinking and feeling. New forms of information processing promise to displace the need for expertise and even comprehensionat least for those with access to the data.Infoglut explores the connections between these wide-ranging sense-making strategies for an era of information overload and big data, and the new forms of control they enable. Andrejevic critiques the popular embrace of deconstructive debunkery, calling into question the post-truth, post-narrative, and post-comprehension politics it underwrites, and tracing a way beyond them.
Author: Russell Kirk
File Type: pdf
Though much has been written about T. S. Eliot since it was first published, Eliot and His Age remains the best introduction to the poets life, ideas, and literary works. It is the essential starting place for anyone who would understand what Eliot was about. Russell Kirks view of his older friend is sympathetic but not adulatory. His insights into Eliots writings are informed by wide reading in the same authors who most influenced the poet, as well as by similar experiences and convictions. Kirk elaborates here a significant theory of literary meaning in general, showing how great literary works awaken our intuitive reason, giving us profound visions of truth that transcend logical processes. And he traces Eliots political and cultural ideas to their true sources, showing the balance and subtlety of Eliots views. Eliot and His Age is a literary biography that will endure when much of the more recent writing on Eliot is gathering dust.** Though much has been written about T. S. Eliot since it was first published, Eliot and His Age remains the best introduction to the poets life, ideas, and literary works. It is the essential starting place for anyone who would understand what Eliot was about. Russell Kirks view of his older friend is sympathetic but not adulatory. His insights into Eliots writings are informed by wide reading in the same authors who most influenced the poet, as well as by similar experiences and convictions. Kirk elaborates here a significant theory of literary meaning in general, showing how great literary works awaken our intuitive reason, giving us profound visions of truth that transcend logical processes. And he traces Eliots political and cultural ideas to their true sources, showing the balance and subtlety of Eliots views. Eliot and His Age is a literary biography that will endure when much of the more recent writing on Eliot is gathering dust.**About the AuthorRussell Kirk (191894) was an independent man of letters whose best-known book is The Conservative Mind From Burke to Eliot. Several of his other books, including The American Cause, The Roots of American Order, The Politics of Prudence, Redeeming the Time, and The Sword of Imagination, are available from ISI Books. New introduction by Benjamin G. Lockerd Jr. Lockerd is a professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Grand Valley State University. He is a former president of the T. S. Eliot Society and is currently on the societys board of directors. His books include The Sacred Marriage Psychic Integration in The Faerie Queene and Aethereal Rumours T. S. Eliots Physics and Poetics.
Author: Robert Boswell
File Type: epub
Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards is an exhilarating collection, as brash as it is wise, by Robert Boswell one of our great storytellersSet mainly in small, gritty American cities, each of these stories is a world unto itself. A mans obsessive visits to a fortuneteller leave him nearly homeless. Time collapses as two marriages slowly dissolve. And in the searing title story, a young man recounts the summer he spent in a mountain town, squatting in a borrowed house with a loose band of slackers, abstaining from all drugs (other than mushrooms)and ultimately asking just what kind of harm we can do to one another.**From Publishers WeeklyIn this imaginative story collection, author Boswell (Centurys Son) examines the limits and losses of ordinary souls with technical mastery and profound sympathy. In No River Wide, a widowed woman visiting a longtime friend in Florida discovers that their friendship is over her story unfolds in overlapping narratives that form a startling, resonant meditation on the nature of time. Another story finds a 30-something returning to his North Dakota home to identify the body of his missing mother what he finds instead frees him from the long shadow of his embittered father. In the title story, a gang spends the summer squatting in the home of a vacationing family, with dire consequences in Supreme Beings, a priests attempts to intervene in the lives of three troubled youths lead him to confront personal and professional failure. Boswell conveys the sordid but hopeful inner lives of average people with insight and care his shorter stories (Miss Famous, Skin Deep) showcase his pleasure in language and invention, and his longer tales pack the emotional weight of a novel. (May) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. ReviewLike Richard Yates, Robert Boswell seems always to wish he had better news for us. In the wide-ranging stories of The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, he wishes we werent so lost, so conflicted, so stubborn in our misapprehensions. But hes been watching us too closely, with too clear an eye, too keen an intelligence, and besides, Boswells real talent, like Yatess, is for telling us the truth. RICHARD RUSSO [Boswell] shows a sensitive and comprehensive understanding of the quirks that can shake a person off course from fear, passivity and pride to external knocks and dings that are easier to spot, harder to fix. *The New York Times Book Review An unnerving, fascinating collection. O, The Oprah Magazine*