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Well read and dead : a high society mystery
After a long, decadent European vacation, Pauline returns to learn she's lost nearly $20 million in bad investments, Air France lost her Louis Vuitton luggage, and her best friend, Whitney, who's been taking care of her precious cat, Fleur, has vanished. Whitney's grief-stricken husband offers Pauline a multimillion-dollar reward to find Whitney, taking the daring amateur sleuth all the way to Thailand and Vietnam.
Book
Church and Estate
InChurch and Estate, Thomas Rzeznik examines the lives and religious commitments of the Philadelphia elite during the period of industrial prosperity that extended from the late nineteenth century through the 1920s. The book demonstrates how their religious beliefs informed their actions and shaped their class identity, while simultaneously revealing the ways in which financial influences shaped the character of American religious life. In tracing those connections, it shows how religion and wealth shared a fruitful, yet ultimately tenuous, relationship.
eBook
To Follow in Their Footsteps
When the First Crusade ended with the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, jubilant crusaders returned home to Europe bringing with them stories, sacred relics, and other memorabilia, including banners, jewelry, and weapons. In the ensuing decades, the memory of the crusaders' bravery and pious sacrifice was invoked widely among the noble families of western Christendom. Popes preaching future crusades would count on these very same families for financing, leadership, and for the willing warriors who would lay down their lives on the battlefield. Despite the great risks and financial hardships associated with crusading, descendants of those who suffered and died on crusade would continue to take the cross, in some cases over several generations. Indeed, as Nicholas L. Paul reveals inTo Follow in Their Footsteps, crusading was very much a family affair.
Scholars of the crusades have long pointed to the importance of dynastic tradition and ties of kinship in the crusading movement but have failed to address more fundamental questions about the operation of these social processes. What is a \"family tradition\"? How are such traditions constructed and maintained, and by whom? How did crusading families confront the loss of their kin in distant lands? Making creative use of Latin dynastic narratives as well as vernacular literature, personal possessions and art objects, and architecture from across western Europe, Paul shows how traditions of crusading were established and reinforced in the collective memories of noble families throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Even rulers who never fulfilled crusading vows found their political lives dominated and, in some ways, directed by the memory of their crusading ancestors. Filled with unique insights and careful analysis,To Follow in Their Footstepsreveals the lasting impact of the crusades, beyond the expeditions themselves, on the formation of dynastic identity and the culture of the medieval European nobility.
eBook
Elitization: Mainsprings of Elite Social Control of Local Politics in Cameroon
In Cameroon, development priorities and the need to ensure social peace have led to the emergence of elites as social relays for community grievances within the state apparatus. The legitimacy of their role entails the conversion of political and administrative positions into resources. Based on data collected from a field survey, this article shows how those who gain access to the status of state nobility build their legitimacy. It postulates that political-administrative promotion is not enough to transform an individual into an elite: he must build his elitism. That is why I put forward the hypothesis of elitization, understood as a process of conjunctural legitimization of elite status.
Journal Article
Emotion, restraint, and community in ancient Rome
Emotion, Restraint, and Community examines the ways in which emotions, and talk about emotions, interacted with the ethics of the Roman upper classes in the late Republic and early Empire. By considering how various Roman forms of fear, dismay, indignation, and revulsion created an economy of displeasure that shaped society in constructive ways, the book casts new light both on the Romans and on cross-cultural understanding of emotions.
eBook
Democracy as Disorder
Scholars contend that weak institutions as manifest in corruption and bad governance are driving people towards illiberal forms of democracy. This explanation is underspecified. It does not make clear why people are turning towards authoritarian rule instead of working to strengthen democratic institutions. It cannot explain why we are seeing, specifically, a turn to the politics of discipline in countries like the Philippines.We need a better grasp of how weak institutions are experienced and how this experience shapes people’s attitudes towards democracy. Drawing upon several years of ethnographic research, I depict the experience of democracy of the upper and middle class in Metro Manila. For informants, the problem of democracy is not that institutions are weak but that valued institutions are actively contradicted by disvalued ones. They describe an experience of disorder, identifying four major sources: corruption, rule-bending, clientelism, and informal settlement. A view of democracy as disorder prompts calls for “disciplining” it. These findings lead us to reframe the issue. Whereas aweak institutions’ framework emphasizes the gap between valued rules and regressive norms, I emphasize their contradiction as shaping perceptions of disorder. Contradiction is experienced as a moral dilemma, a conflict between how things are done and how they should be done. This experience is informed by a normative sensibility rooted in upper- and middle-class position. The framework provides a better account of democratic backsliding: socially embedded, broader in scope, and closer to experience.
Journal Article