We identify two processes by which humans increase genetic exchange among groups of individuals: by affecting the distribution of groups and dispersal patterns across a landscape, and by affecting interbreeding among sympatric or parapatric groups. Each of these processes might then have two different effects on biodiversity: changes in the number of taxa through merging or splitting of groups, and the extinction/extirpation of taxa through effects on fitness. We review the various ways in which humans are affecting genetic exchange, and (...) highlight the difficulties in predicting the impacts on biodiversity. Gene flow and hybridization are crucially important evolutionary forces influencing biodiversity. Humans alter natural patterns of genetic exchange in myriad ways, and these anthropogenic effects are likely to influence the genetic integrity of populations and species. We argue that taking a gene-centric view towards conservation will help resolve issues pertaining to conservation and management.Editor's suggested further reading in BioEssays A systemic view of biodiversity and its conservation: Processes, interrelationships, and human culture Abstract. (shrink)

Amidst increasing concerns about harmful ecological change brought about by human actions upon the earth, environmental thinkers and activists attempt to envision human relations with the earth in new ways. Such thinking, however, frequently comes up against an inability to conceive of the more-than-human world as something towards which we can empathize or sympathize or to which we owe justice. As such, a powerful force in environmental discourse sees this problem as intractable and sees ecological change as a problem to (...) be solved and the future of the earth as something to be managed rather than to explore new forms of relations with. This chapter explores Robert Waters’ art project uncover RECOVER in terms of this problem. His project activates a reflection on human life and social relations that fosters social healing and transformation. Is there a way to activate a similar process, but in terms of a natural healing of the earth and a social transformation of our relations to the earth? In considering this question, I explore Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel’s concept of “reparation ecology” and analyse how the idea of the Anthropocene blocks our capacities to think the reparation of human relations with the more-than-human world. I suggest that that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concepts of becoming and sympathy offer a way of thinking human relations with earth others that could generate ethical and political responses to ecological change where the more-than-human world is considered as a co-participant and collaborator in human action and a subject to whom justice is owed. Sympathy with the non- human world acknowledges that human capacities are constituted by non-human materials and affects that do not respect the boundaries that tend to frame our thinking. Rather than continuing to allow our traditional assumptions about the separation of humans and nature to shape our relations to non-human world, imagining the human in new ways makes possible new forms of relations with the earth. I argue that attending to the ways that humans co-become with the non-human world affords opportunities for transforming human relations with the more-than-human world by fostering spaces for the emergence of new ecological sensibilities and potentials for social-ecological justice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Imagining the Moor in Medieval PortugalJosiah Blackmore (bio)For medieval Portugal, Africa was familiar and strange, a known place across the modest parcel of the Mediterranean between the Algarve and Ceuta, and, farther south, an unknown expanse of land that glimmered black under the equatorial sun. And for Portugal, like for Spain, Africa was part of the demographics and history of Iberian culture in the figure of the Moor, at (...) once an “other” and a closer, more intimate presence. Jeffrey J. Cohen reminds us of the “cultural work” of the Saracen (one of the medieval terminological possibilities for “Moor”), “whose dark skin and diabolical physiognomy were the western Middle Ages’ most familiar, most exorbitant embodiment of racial alterity” [189]. Cohen argues, therefore, that the Saracen (grosso modo) existed in a network of literary and ideological productions of western Europe; in the case of Iberia, the Moor was sometimes but not always a Saracen and was both a figure of alterity and of familiarity and sameness, less an aprioristic other and more of a figure that could be variously othered as a marker of boundaries including “race,” spirituality, and sexuality. While this essay does not take on the idea of racial alterity per se, it does assume the notion that in the literary culture of Portugal blackness, in some manner, informed constructions of the Moor. My purpose here is to delineate an understanding of the Moor in medieval Portugal as a construct that resists easy categorizations as an undifferentiated figure of otherness, a consideration that culminates with the work of Gomes Eanes de Zurara (1410?–1474?), the first chronicler of Portuguese exploration into (west) Africa. To this end, I will briefly consider the Moor in representative examples from the livros de linhagens (genealogical books) and the cantigas d’escarnho e de mal dizer (poetry of mockery and insult, hereafter abbreviated CEM), not so much in order to trace a direct influence between these texts and the work of Zurara but to provide an idea of how the Moor was variously fashioned in earlier texts. The analysis here is not exhaustive nor conclusive but suggestive, and is meant to indicate how the Moor—and the idea of the Moor—in Portugal can add to critical conversations on the imaginative and ideological constructions of the Moor and of Africa and its inhabitants.The formulations of national and cultural identities in European texts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance1 that in some way engage Africa and the African have increasingly [End Page 27] and understandably become an object of interest among literary and cultural theorists. One of the advances in recent years of this critical work is the freeing of the Moor from the strictures of the “self/other” binary that permeated earlier scholarly work on Europeans and their others, especially in the field of imperial/colonial studies or in the study of the conflictive representations of Moors and Europeans in genres such as medieval epic.2 In the medieval field, Cohen’s work on the Saracen is one good example of this more theoretically suggestive approach, since Cohen explores the work of representation as it dovetails with the universalizing claims of psychoanalysis. Suzanne Conklin Akbari’s essay usefully reminds us that the medieval world considered itself as existing in three parts, thus making problematic modern applications of binaries as supposedly informing a medieval perception of “Asian Orient and European Occident” [20]. Other studies, though concerned with postmedieval literatures and histories, also explore the cultural work of the Moor. Such, for instance, is the case with Emily C. Bartels’s articles on the Moor in Shakespeare. Bartels charts the flexibilities and inconsistencies of the term “Moor” in Renaissance England [“Making More” 434], noting especially its “racial” claims. In analyzing the place of postcolonialism as it might inform critical work on Africa in the Renaissance, Bartels questions the model that postcolonial studies assumes as underlying its own practice by arguing that “[postcolonial critiques] continue … to recreate the history of silenced voices through only one model of cultural exchange: one in which European domination is both the motivating force and the inevitable outcome” [“Othello and Africa” 46].These representative studies of the Moor tag... (shrink)

We investigate the processes underlying the feeling of control over one’s actions . Sense of agency may depend on internal motoric signals, and general inferences about external events. We used priming to modulate the sense of agency for voluntary and involuntary movements, by modifying the content of conscious thought prior to moving. Trials began with the presentation of one of two supraliminal primes, which corresponded to the effect of a voluntary action participants subsequently made. The perceived interval between movement and (...) effect was used as an implicit measure of sense of agency. Primes modulated perceived intervals for both voluntary and involuntary movements, but the modulation was greatest for involuntary movements. A second experiment showed that this modulation depended on prime–movement contiguity. We propose that sense of agency is based on a combination of internal motoric signals and external sensory evidence about the source of actions and effects. (shrink)

Across 13 essays "e; 12 of which were previously unavailable in English "e; Deleuze specialist Anne Sauvagnargues reveals the continuing potential of Deleuze, Guattari and Simondon to invent new concepts and new modes of creativity and existence. She redeploys their work, together with other key philosophers including Bergson, Lacan, Deligny and Ruyer, to create new concepts including geophilosophy, the artmachine, the ritornello, schizoanalysis and the machinic assemblage.

What do people consciously experience when they read? There has been almost no rigorous research on this question, and opinions diverge radically among both philosophers and psychologists. We describe three studies of the phenomenology of reading and its relationship to memory of textual detail and general cognitive abilities. We find three main results. First, there is substantial variability in reports about reading experience, both within and between participants. Second, reported reading experience varies with passage type: passages with dialogue prompted increased (...) reports of inner speech, while passages with vivid visual detail prompted increased reports of visual imagery. Third, reports of visual imagery experiences, inner speech experiences, and experiences of conscious visual perception of the words on the page were at best weakly related to general cognitive abilities and memory of visual and auditory details. (shrink)

How children go about learning the general regularities that govern language, as well as keeping track of the exceptions to them, remains one of the challenging open questions in the cognitive science of language. Computational modeling is an important methodology in research aimed at addressing this issue. We must determine appropriate learning mechanisms that can grasp generalizations from examples of specific usages, and that exhibit patterns of behavior over the course of learning similar to those in children. Early learning of (...) verb argument structure is an area of language acquisition that provides an interesting testbed for such approaches due to the complexity of verb usages. A range of linguistic factors interact in determining the felicitous use of a verb in various constructions—associations between syntactic forms and properties of meaning that form the basis for a number of linguistic and psycholinguistic theories of language. This article presents a computational model for the representation, acquisition, and use of verbs and constructions. The Bayesian framework is founded on a novel view of constructions as a probabilistic association between syntactic and semantic features. The computational experiments reported here demonstrate the feasibility of learning general constructions, and their exceptions, from individual usages of verbs. The behavior of the model over the timecourse of acquisition mimics, in relevant aspects, the stages of learning exhibited by children. Therefore, this proposal sheds light on the possible mechanisms at work in forming linguistic generalizations and maintaining knowledge of exceptions. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the idea that under one way of understanding cheating, Armstrong did not fulfill any of the three necessary conditions: that cheating violates a rule—I will make the case that though doping was against the official rules, it was not against the rules the athletes used; that it is cheating if the intent is to obtain an unfair advantage—I will argue that dopers were not attempting to obtain an unfair advantage, at least on one plausible understanding (...) of fairness; and that cheating requires fair enforcement of the rules—I will show that the official rules against doping were hardly enforced at all, much less fairly enforced, and thus lacked enough sufficient normative force to deem breaking them cheating. (shrink)

In discussions of ‘religion-and-science’, faith is usually emphasized more than works, scientists’ beliefs more than their deeds. By reversing the priority, a lingering puzzle in the life of Ronald Aylmer Fisher , statistician, eugenicist and founder of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, can be solved. Scholars have struggled to find coherence in Fisher’s simultaneous commitment to Darwinism, Anglican Christianity and eugenics. The problem is addressed by asking what practical mode of faith or faithful mode of practice lent unity to his life? Families, (...) it is argued, with their myriad practical, emotional and intellectual challenges, rendered a mathematically-based eugenic Darwinian Christianity not just possible for Fisher, but vital. (shrink)

This article responds to Marzia Milazzo's article ‘On white ignorance, white shame, and other pitfalls in critical philosophy of race’, in which Milazzo argues that the concepts white shame, white guilt, white privilege, white habits, white invisibility and white ignorance are pitfalls in the process of decolonisation. Milazzo contends that the way these concepts are theorised in much critical philosophy of race minimises white people's active interest in reproducing the racial status quo. While I agree with Milazzo's critique of white (...) shame and white guilt, I argue that these affective responses are fundamentally different to the remaining concepts. Drawing on critical whiteness studies and agnotology, I argue that white privilege, white invisibility and white ignorance are valuable conceptual tools for revealing white people's active investment in maintaining racial inequality. Whereas Milazzo sees a contradiction between white people's active interest in maintaining racial inequality and concepts like white invisibility and white ignorance, I argue that, correctly theorised, these concepts resolve this apparent contradiction. I contest Milazzo's call to reject white privilege, white invisibility and white ignorance, arguing that these concepts are useful tools in the project of decolonisation. (shrink)

Genetics researchers often work with distinct communities. To take moral account of how their research affects these communities, they need a richer conception of justice and they need to make those communities equal participants in decision‐making about how the research is conducted and what is produced and published out of it.

Orienting biases for speech may provide a foundation for language development. Although human infants show a bias for listening to speech from birth, the relation of a speech bias to later language development has not been established. Here, we examine whether infants' attention to speech directly predicts expressive vocabulary. Infants listened to speech or non-speech in a preferential listening procedure. Results show that infants' attention to speech at 12 months significantly predicted expressive vocabulary at 18 months, while indices of general (...) development did not. No predictive relationships were found for infants' attention to non-speech, or overall attention to sounds, suggesting that the relationship between speech and expressive vocabulary was not a function of infants' general attentiveness. Potentially ancient evolutionary perceptual capacities such as biases for conspecific vocalizations may provide a foundation for proficiency in formal systems such language, much like the approximate number sense may provide a foundation for formal mathematics. (shrink)

In the twenty-first century, 70.6 percent of Americans self-identify as Christians,1 58 percent of them still segregate themselves by race on Sunday mornings, and white Protestants make up the majority of this 58 percent.2 These facts belie the claim, popularized after Barack Obama's 2008 presidential election, that America is living in a postracial society3 And yet, the role played by religion in white people's lived experiences of race, racism, and white class privilege in the United States tends to be neglected (...) by philosophers and religious studies scholars, except perhaps when considering white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.4 Contemporary philosophy is secular in a way that generally excludes and... (shrink)

Plato's Hesiod is a neglected topic, scholars having long regarded Plato's Homer as a more promising field of inquiry. My aim in this chapter is to demonstrate that this particular bias of scholarly attention, although understandable, is unjustified. Of no other dialogue is this truer than of the Ion.

The status of beauty in Plotinus' metaphysics is unclear: is it a Form in Intellect, the Intelligible Principle itself, or the One? Basing themselves on a number of well-known passages in the "Enneads," and assuming that Plotinus' Forms are similar in function and status to Plato's, many scholars hold that Plotinus theorized beauty as a determinate entity in Intellect. Such assumptions, it is here argued, lead to difficulties over self-predication, the interpretation of Plotinus's rich and varied aesthetic terminology and, most (...) of all, the puzzling dearth of references, in the whole of the "Enneads," to a Form of Beauty. A detailed reading of VI.7.32 and 33 reveals that, in these two crucial passages at least, Plotinus adopts an aesthetic approach to the One and that, far from confining Beauty to Intellect, he equates the One, the Good and the Beautiful. This reading is here supported not only by an analysis of the text but also by a consideration of the semantic differences between μορφή and ε[unrepresentable symbol]δος, the inter-relatedness, in Plotinus' philosophy, of the concepts of love and value, and the exclusion of beauty from the πρ[unrepresentable symbol]τα γένη. In turn, the exegesis of VI.7.32 and 33 raises the issue of the significance for aesthetics understood in the narrow sense of the word, of Plotinus's ontology of beauty. It is here claimed that in so far as sensible beauty, both artistic and natural, can be nothing else than an effect of the shaping action of the Forms and a reflection of their radiance, singular or global, it should not be held that Plotinus had an aesthetics in the modern sense of this term. (shrink)

Speaking roughly, there are two competing accounts of the basis of love. First, the appraisal view: love is based in reasons derived from the valuable properties of the beloved. Second, the bestowal view: love is not based in reasons derived from the valuable properties of the beloved, but love is based in the lover, who then bestows value onto the beloved. While both models deserve due attention, the bestowal model is of present concern. Despite numerous virtues, the bestowal model faces (...) trenchant objections. In this paper, I outline and defend a version of bestowal love, according to which bestowal love is based in the lover’s motivating reasons, and which preserves the virtues while overcoming the difficulties facing bestowal love. (shrink)

_Charts the stages of the history of friendship as a philosophical concept in the Western world._.

The personality and the writings of Marsilio Ficino mark the turning point from the middleages to the Renaissance. In John Marenbon’s apt description, medieval philosophy is ‘the story of a complex tradition founded in Neoplatonism, but not simply as a continuation or development of Neoplatonism itself’. ‘Not simply’ because the Enneads, the first and finest flowering of that tradition, testify to Plotinus’ deep engagement, not only with the thought of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and the Middle Platonists, but also with (...) a variety of theologico-mystical writings of diverse middleeastern provenances, from Egypt to Persia. This complex tradition, Ficino transmitted to the West in the form of translations from Greek into Latin of the dialogues of Plato and the Enneads of Plotinus as well as of several commentaries on those texts by later thinkers. In addition to such exegetical works, Ficino wrote several philosophical treatises of his own. Finally, as an ordained priest, he was also well acquainted with the writings of the Church Fathers, all of which had contributed to his belief that religion should not be separated from philosophy. To the completion of this ambitious scholarly programme and the fulfilment of his commitment to the Church, he brought the resources of his powerfully syncretistic mind. Rather than merely combining various texts and traditions, he made them speak to each other and, in the process, evolved a system that was both sui generis and attuned to the new ways of thinking that were then emerging in quattrocento Florence. His in-depth understanding of all these texts, together with his ability to spot similarities, analogies and correspondences between them, enabled him to fuse into a coherent system various elements which a modern historian of philosophy would regard as dissimilar if not incompatible. His philosophical acumen enabled him, when he thought it appropriate, to improve on the views of those he regarded as his masters and to fill whatever gaps he found in their arguments. The present essay is an attempt to unravel the nature of Ficino’s syncretism, in which three levels of widening scope will be distinguished: authorial, trans-authorial and trans-doctrinal. To achieve a desirable level of both precision and concision, a short text will then be analysed, namely Speech Five of his most widely read treatise, a Latin commentary on Plato’s Symposium, entitled Commentarium in Convivium Platonis De Amore. It will be shown how, through the fictional speech that he put in the mouth of Marsuppini, his chosen spokesperson of the Platonic Agathon, Ficino succeeded, not only in blending Platonic, Plotinian and Christian elements in the reconstruction of an argument that Plato had meant us to regard as flawed to the core, but he also composed an elegant and original speech that continues to intrigue and enchant its readers after a gap of over six centuries. (shrink)

The paper, although polemical for the most part, also presents a substantive thesis. The polemical part is directed at the claim that the Platonic Socrates held that philosophy as a practice is to be devoted to the care of self and others, and that the expression of emotion is an important aspect of the philosophic life. To undermine that claim, counter-examples from the autobiographical narrative in the Phaedo and the speeches of Diotima and Alcibiades in the Symposium are brought in. (...) Once analysed at the required depth, those passages show that, on the contrary, Plato's Socrates remains consistently dispassionate both in his life, as he narrates it, and in the views he is made to express in the two dialogues. Rather than promoting self-expression, Socrates never ceased to warn us against misology. (shrink)

Is scientific reasoning the standard of rationality? Can historical explanation be reduced to the scientific mode of reasoning? R.G. Collingwood answered both questions negatively. He further attempted to show that the types of justification used to account for moral actions are closely similar to historical explanations. His ethics has thus a strong historicist and relativistio flavour. Hie aim of my paper is to state Collingwood's ethical views and to show that the "ethical judgment", which inevitably relies on rules, cannot be (...) equated with the "historical judgment". (shrink)

Camp might be said to be a queer object to the extent that it resists any attempt to define it in language. This essay reads Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair as a demonstration of the more performative and affective understanding of camp that is needed to overcome the conceptual impossibility of camp’s existence in language alone. This essay reconceptualizes camp as a performative and affective social phenomenon by reading the protagonist of White’s text as an exemplary figure who resists disciplinary (...) identity and legibility through a series of camp performances. Camp emerges at the conclusion of this essay as a mediation of a particular subject–object relation, and its emblem is the bandaid. For if shame appears to tyrannize the life of Twyborn’s protagonist, that subjugation is not total: shame’s performativity gives birth to a defiantly camp persona that re-routes shame as shamelessness. Camp advertises itself as a means of living in and living through performances of gender and sexuality. Shame is thus an important resource for both understanding the protagonist of White’s text and understanding the camp politics of queer critique that he embodies. Camp is a queer object that facilitates the healing of the shameful wound afflicting performative identities. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe article uses the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in the same-sex marriage caseObergefell v. Hodgesas the springboard for a general enquiry into the nature and existence of a constitutional right to liberty under the American Constitution. The discussion is divided into two main parts. The first examines the meaning and the justifiability of there being a moral right to liberty as a matter of political philosophy. Two such rights are distinguished and defended: first, a right not to be coerced (...) by the state when the state is motivated by improper reasons ; and second, a right not to be coerced by the state when there are insufficient justifying reasons for the state to do so, irrespective of how such state coercion may be motivated. Neither right is regarded as “absolute,” and so it is morally permissible for the state to override such rights in certain circumstances. The second part of the article examines the distinct and additional considerations that must be taken into account when these two moral rights to liberty are fashioned into corresponding legal rights under American constitutional law. Both such rights survive the transformation, but each becomes altered somewhat in its content. This legal transformation includes recognition of the nonabsolute nature of moral rights, such recognition taking the form of some doctrine of “compelling state interests.” The discussion in these two main parts of the article is prefaced with a defense of the article's use of political philosophy to inform constitutional law, a defense motivated by Chief Justice Robert's denunciation of such an approach to constitutional law in his opinion inObergefell. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 33.1 (2003) 60-79 [Access article in PDF] The Secret Power of Suggestion Scipio Sighele and the Postliberal Subject Suzanne R. Stewart-Steinberg He experiments one by one with about thirty young men. [...] Almost all of them respond immediately to his power of fascination by turning stiff throughout their bodies; their faces become contracted, terrified, sometimes cadaverous; they are at the mercy of the fascinator and follow his (...) movements like a magnet. [...] There is something pitiful, spasmodic in their features, something macabre in their gestures. [...] Donato has them all in his power, he attracts them in threes, in sixes, ten at a time, simply by rapidly staring into their eyes, even against their firm will and their obstinate efforts to resist his suggestion. [...] Donato, in the process, never speaks: he thinks, he wants and points. [...] —an eyewitness account, L'Italia (1886) Young male bodies that turn stiff despite their efforts to do otherwise—such were the events to be seen on the stage of the Teatro Scribe in Turin in 1886, events performed under the direction of "Donato" (the Belgian-born Alfred d'Hont), the new theatrical magnetizer of crowds. Enrico Morselli, one of Italy's leading psychiatrists of the period,1 assisted and himself succumbed to the fascination of Donato. In his important 1886 study on animal magnetism and hypnotic states, Morelli provided a rather positive portrait of the man. Donato, in his opinion, was not a vulgar man. First soldier, then state employee, journalist, novelist, poet, and finally student and apostle of animal magnetism, Donato had revolutionized hypnotic practice through his discovery of a phenomenon called "fascination." Donato was blessed with uncommon physical strength, quick and insistent eyes, a great agility of movement and much spirit. He had exchanged the magician's cap for the more sober tuxedo—quite appropriately, for he [End Page 60]rejects fluids, rejects the power and transmission of will; nor does he trade in somnambulist lucidity, in sight without eyes, in divination. He does not claim to have special secrets or gifts. Instead he claims that it is his quick and insistent "gaze" that produces a rapid and sudden shock to the nervous system of sensitive individuals. Where there is no "orgasm," he told me—but more accurately he should have said "predisposition"—his method does not work. [Morselli, Il magnetismo animale 281] What was then so revolutionary about Donato's method? Why were the spectacles at the Teatro Scribe perceived to be so radically new? And above all, why, as Morselli claims, did these shows come close to producing a political crisis right at the center of Europe [Magnetismo 271]?James Braid's discovery in 1842 that hypnotic sleep could be induced by the simple fixation on a luminous object had revolutionized magnetic theory and practice. Braid's was to prove an important discovery, for it made possible the shift from the putative supernatural powers of the hypnotist—based on the theory of the transmission of magnetic fluids or electric currents—to an analysis of characteristics thought to inhere in the hypnotized subject him- or herself. The real cause of hypnosis, its very effectivity, was to be found, as Morselli remarks, not in the magnetizer but in his subject [Magnetismo 32]. A rethinking, within the late-nineteenth-century literature on hypnotism, of what drives the subject, of what makes him act appears predicated then on a very peculiar form of interiority, of self-causation within the subject himself. At the end of its historical trajectory this rethinking would first result in the idea of auto-hypnosis or auto-suggestion, and then, by the beginning of the new century, it would found the psychoanalytic subject, traversed as he is by conflicting desires and topographically split between ego and superego. In both instances, however, obedience is exacted as a result of an internalized command and—and here lies the peculiarity and utter novelty of this subject—for that reason the subject ceases to be master of his own house.In the remarks that follow, I will leave aside Freud's own contributions... (shrink)

We do not know how much clinical physicians carrying out clinical trials in oncology and haematology struggle with ethical concerns. To our knowledge, no empirical research exists on these questions in a Nordic context. Therefore, this study aims to learn what kinds of ethical challenges physicians in Sweden, Denmark and Finland face when caring for patients in clinical trials; and what strategies, if any, they have developed to deal with them. The main findings were that clinical cancer trials pose ethical (...) challenges related to autonomy issues, unreasonable hope for benefits and the therapeutic misconception. Nevertheless, some physicians expressed that struggling with such challenges was not of great concern. This conveys a culture of hope where health care professionals and patients uphold hope and mutually support belief in clinical trials. This culture being implicit, physicians need opportunities to deliberately reflect over the characteristics that should constitute this culture. (shrink)

In many facets of Western culture, including archaeology, there remains a legacy of perceiving gender divisions as natural, innate, and biological in origin. This belief follows that men are naturally pre-disposed to public, intellectual pursuits, while women are innately designed to care for the home and take care of children. In the interpretation of material culture, accepted notions of gender roles are often applied to new findings: the dichotomy between the domestic sphere of women and the public sphere of men (...) can color interpretations of new materials. In this innovative volume, the contributors focus explicitly on analyzing the materiality of historic changes in the domestic sphere around the world. Combining a global scope with great temporal depth, chapters in the volume explore how gender ideologies, identities, relationships, power dynamics, and practices were materially changed in the past, thus showing how they could be changed in the future. (shrink)