When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historic...

The decades between 1970 and the end of the twentieth century saw the disciplines of history and anthropology draw closer together, with historians paying more attention to social and cultural factors and the significance of everyday experience in the study of the past. The people, rather than elite actors, became the focus of their inquiry, and anthropological insights into agriculture, kinship, ritual, and folk customs enabled historians to develop richer and more representative narrativ...

Historical anthropology: critical exchange between two decidedly distinct disciplines or innovative mode of knowledge production? As this volume’s title suggests, the essays Brian Keith Axel has gathered in From the Margins seek to challenge the limits of discrete disciplinary epistemologies and conventions, gesturing instead toward a transdisciplinary understanding of the emerging relations between archive and field.In original articles encompassing a wide range of geograp...

During his four years as the tenth Chancellor of Berkeley (2013–17), Nicholas B. Dirks was confronted by crises arguably more challenging than those faced by any other college administrator in the contemporary period. This thoughtfully candid book, emerging from deep reflection on his turbulent time in office, offers not just a gripping insider's account of the febrile politics of his time as Berkeley's leader, but also decades of nuanced reflection on the university's true meaning (at its...

Many have told of the East India Company’s extraordinary excesses in eighteenth-century India, of the plunder that made its directors fabulously wealthy and able to buy British land and titles, but this is only a fraction of the story. When one of these men—Warren Hastings—was put on trial by Edmund Burke, it brought the Company’s exploits to the attention of the public. Through the trial and after, the British government transformed public understanding of the Company’s corrupt actions by...

Colonialism and Culture, edited by Nicholas B. Dirks, is an insightful exploration of the intricate relationship between colonialism and cultural transformation. The book features contributions that reflect how colonialism reshaped cultural identities and expressions across the globe, and how it remains a potent force defining both historical and contemporary landscapes. Drawing on cases from different historical periods and geographic locations, the essays examine how colonial powers impo...

The intellectual radicalism of the 1960s spawned a new set of questions about the role and nature of "the political" in social life, questions that have since revolutionized nearly every field of thought, from literary criticism through anthropology to the philosophy of science. Michel Foucault in particular made us aware that whatever our functionally defined "roles" in society, we are constantly negotiating questions of authority and the control of the definitions of reality. Such insigh...

As the use of AI becomes more and more ubiquitous in companies around the world, managers charged with taking key decisions require resources to enable them to evaluate new projects effectively. The business case for AI projects is not necessarily clear cut and part of the reason for this is the lack of understanding on key decision criteria. AI touches on many ethical concepts - data privacy, validity and more importantly, its potential misuse. AI is often being used to replace human deci...

In summer 1960, Adorno gave the first of a series of lectures devoted to the relation between sociology and philosophy. One of his central concerns was to dispel the notion, erroneous in his view, that these were two incompatible disciplines, radically opposed in their methods and aims, a notion that was shared by many. While some sociologists were inclined to dismiss philosophy as obsolete and incapable of dealing with the pressing social problems of our time, many philosophers, influence...

This book presents the work of the RILEM Technical Committee 276-DFC: Digital fabrication with cement-based materials. The most important outcomes of the technical committee are presented. First, a unified process classification for digital fabrication with concrete is proposed, discussed and illustrated. Then, a state of the art of the testing methods (both at a material and structural level and in the fresh and hardened state) is provided. The gathered knowledge is expected to form the f...

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Innovation is a pivotal driving force behind economic growth. Technological capability deepens and diversifies industrial activity, which fundamentally enhances growth potential. Consequently, failure to build effective technological capability can lead to slow long-...

Moral relativism attracts and repels. What is defensible in it and what is to be rejected? Do we as human beings have no shared standards by which we can understand one another? Can we abstain from judging one another's practices? Do we truly have divergent views about what constitutes good and evil, virtue and vice, harm and welfare, dignity and humiliation, or is there some underlying commonality that trumps it all?These questions turn up everywhere, from Montaigne's essay on can...