Freedom In Entangled Worlds

Ethnography that explores the political landscape of West Papua and chronicles indigenous struggles for independence during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

In The Entangled God, Kirk Wegter-McNelly addresses the age-old theological question of how God is present to the world by constructing a novel, scientifically informed account of the God–world relation. Drawing on recent scientific and philosophical work in "quantum entanglement," Wegter-McNelly develops the metaphor of "divine entanglement" to ground the relationality and freedom of physical process in the power of God’s relational being. The Entangled God makes a three-fold contribution to contemporary theological and religious discourse. First, it calls attention to the convergence of recent theology around the idea of "relationality." Second, it introduces theological and religious readers to the fascinating story of quantum entanglement. Third, it offers a robust "plerotic" alternative to kenotic accounts of God’s suffering presence in the world. Above all, this book takes us beyond the view of theology and science as adversaries and demonstrates the value of constructively relating these two important areas of intellectual investigation.

This wide-ranging volume captures the diverse range of societies and experiences that form what has come to be known as Melanesia. It covers prehistoric, historic and contemporary issues, and includes work by art historians, political scientists, geographers and anthropologists. The chapters range from studies of subsistence, ritual and ceremonial exchange to accounts of state violence, new media and climate change. The ‘Melanesian world’ assembled here raises questions that cut to the heart of debates in the human sciences today, with profound implications for the ways in which scholars across disciplines can describe and understand human difference. This impressive collection of essays represents a valuable resource for scholars and students alike.

Taking a multidisciplinary and global approach, this edited book examines the dynamic role of plantations as productive, socio-political and ecological forms throughout imperial and post-colonial worlds spanning multiple and broad temporalities. Showcasing an expansive range of case studies across different geographies, the collection sheds light on the heterogeneity of plantations and offers insights into the afterlives, spectres and remnants of systems that have been analysed as schemes of production, extraction and authority. Focusing on the expansion of plantation systems throughout various political-economic and ecological projects, and across the modern (and post-modern) period, allows the authors to move beyond analyses that often deal with individual empires through human-centered lenses. The contributors explore resistance to the mechanisms of extraction and control that plantations and their afterlives demanded, shedding light on their excesses, contradictions, failures and deviations. Offering a comprehensive treatment of global plantations, this book provides valuable reading for researchers with an interest in the socio-political and environmental effects of colonialism and imperialism in their various guises. Chapters 1, 8 and 11 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

How places, objects, fantasies, histories, and memories get under our skin and how we understand their affective connections.

Does anthropology have more to offer than just its texts? In this timely and remarkable book, Stuart Kirsch shows how anthropology can—and why it should—become more engaged with the problems of the world. Engaged Anthropology draws on the author’s experiences working with indigenous peoples fighting for their environment, land rights, and political sovereignty. Including both short interventions and collaborations spanning decades, it recounts interactions with lawyers and courts, nongovernmental organizations, scientific experts, and transnational corporations. This unflinchingly honest account addresses the unexamined “backstage” of engaged anthropology. Coming at a time when some question the viability of the discipline, the message of this powerful and original work is especially welcome, as it not only promotes a new way of doing anthropology, but also compellingly articulates a new rationale for why anthropology matters.

To be free is to escape all limitations and obstacles&—or so we think at first. But if we probe further, we discover that freedom embraces its own necessities, a set of conditions without which it could not exist. Freedom's Embrace explores these necessities of freedom. J. Melvin Woody surveys competing conceptions of freedom and traces debates about the nature and reality of freedom to confusions about knowledge, humanity, and nature that are rooted in some of the most fundamental assumptions of modern Western thought. The preemption of freedom as an exclusively human privilege with all nature relegated to mechanical necessity is a fatal error that renders both humanity and nature equally unintelligible. What distinguishes human beings from other animals is not freedom but the use of symbols, which vastly extends the range of available options and enables us to envision freedom as an ideal by which customary institutions and norms may be judged and transformed. By carefully surveying its necessary conditions and limitations, Woody reconciles the salient competing conceptions of freedom and weaves them together into a richer and broader theory that resolves old controversies and opens the way toward an ethics of freedom that can meet the challenges of relativism and nihilism that arise from recognizing the historicity and malleability of culture.