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Negotiating the Sacred II »
Blasphemy and Sacrilege in the Arts
Edited by: Elizabeth Burns Coleman, Maria Suzette Fernandes-Dias
Publication date: December 2008
Blasphemy and other forms of blatant disrespect to religious beliefs have the capacity to create significant civil and even international unrest. Consequently, the sacrosanctity of religious dogmas and beliefs, stringent laws of repression and codes of moral and ethical propriety have compelled artists to live and create with occupational hazards like uncertain audience response, self-censorship and accusations of deliberate misinterpretation of cultural production looming over their heads. Yet, in recent years, issues surrounding the rights of minority cultures to recognition and respect have raised new questions about the contemporariness of the construct of blasphemy and sacrilege. Controversies over the aesthetic representation of the sacred, the exhibition of the sacred as art, and the public display of sacrilegious or blasphemous works have given rise to heated debates and have invited us to reflect on binaries like artistic and religious sensibilities, tolerance and philistinism, the sacred and the profane, deification and vilification.
Endeavouring to move beyond ‘simplistic’ points about the rights to freedom of expression and sacrosanctity, this collection explores how differences between conceptions of the sacred can be negotiated. It recognises that blasphemy may be justified as a form of political criticism, as well as a sincere expression of spirituality. But it also recognises that within a pluralistic society, blasphemy in the arts can do an enormous amount of harm, as it may also impair relations within and between societies.
This collection evolved out a two-day conference called ‘Negotiating the Sacred: Blasphemy and Sacrilege in the Arts’ held at the Centre for Cross Cultural Research at The Australian National University in November 2005. This is the second volume in a series of five conferences and edited collections on the theme ‘Negotiating the Sacred’. The first conference, ‘Negotiating the Sacred: Blasphemy and Sacrilege in a Multicultural Society’ was held at The Australian National University’s Centre for Cross-Cultural Research in 2004, and published as an edited collection by ANU Press in 2006. Other conferences in the series have included Religion, Medicine and the Body (ANU, 2006), Tolerance, Education and the Curriculum (ANU, 2007), and Governing the Family (Monash University, 2008). Together, the series represents a major contribution to ongoing debates on the political demands arising from religious pluralism in multicultural societies.
Transnational Ties »
Australian Lives in the World
Edited by: Desley Deacon, Penny Russell, Angela Woollacott
Publication date: December 2008
Australian lives are intricately enmeshed with the world, bound by ties of allegiance and affinity, intellect and imagination. In Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World, an eclectic mix of scholars—historians, literary critics, and museologists—trace the flow of people that helped shape Australia’s distinctive character and the flow of ideas that connected Australians to a global community of thought. It shows how biography, and the study of life stories, can contribute greatly to our understanding of such patterns of connection and explores how transnationalism can test biography’s limits as an intellectual, professional and commercial practice.
Statistical Mechanics of Nonequilibrium Liquids »
Authored by: Denis J. Evans, Gary P. Morriss
Publication date: August 2007
During the 1980s, there were many developments regarding the nonequilibrium statistical mechanics of dense classical atomic fluids. These developments have had a major impact on the computer simulation methods used to model nonequilibrium fluids. The present volume is, in part, an attempt to provide a pedagogical discussion of the statistical mechanical justification of these algorithms.
There is a symbiotic relationship between theoretical nonequilibrium statistical mechanics on the one hand and the theory and practice of computer simulation on the other. Sometimes, the initiative for progress has been with the pragmatic requirements of computer simulation and at other times, the initiative has been with the fundamental theory of nonequilibrium processes. This book summarises progress in this field up to 1990.
Humanities Research: Volume XIV. No. 2. 2007 »
Pain and Death: Politics, Aesthetics, Legalities
Edited by: Carolyn Strange
Publication date: August 2007
Humanities Research is an internationally peer-reviewed journal published by the Research School of Humanities at The Australian National University. The Research School of Humanities came into existence in January 2007 and consists of the Humanities Research Centre, Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, National Europe Centre and Australian National Dictionary Centre. Launched in 1997, issues are thematic with guest editors and address important and timely topics across all branches of the humanities.
While politics and law may set the boundaries of sanctioned violence within and between states, their understanding and meanings are invariably conditioned by aesthetic questions. Inspired in part by the early phase of the so-called war on terror, when pictures of the penal excesses it unleashed initially created embarrassment and shame, the conference incorporated the work of scholars, artists and performers. This volume’s contributors move beyond the specifics of the war on terror to consider other instances in which officially legitimated violence has been invoked, contested or suppressed, not only through legal and political means, and in official records, but also in popular media and art forms.
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Humanities Research: Volume XIV. No. 1. 2007 »
Historicizing Cross-Cultural Research
Edited by: Benjamin Penny
Publication date: July 2007
Humanities Research is an internationally peer-reviewed journal published by the Research School of Humanities at The Australian National University. The Research School of Humanities came into existence in January 2007 and consists of the Humanities Research Centre, Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, National Europe Centre and Australian National Dictionary Centre. Launched in 1997, issues are thematic with guest editors and address important and timely topics across all branches of the humanities.
This issue of Humanities Research presents a selection of papers that seek to historicize cross-cultural research – involving studies of particular encounters between people of different cultures and investigation of the disciplinary categories in which those studies took place – and, in so doing, interrogate the term ‘cross-cultural’ and the variety of meanings it has accrued.
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Humanities Research: Volume XIII. No. 1. 2006 »
Britishness & Otherness
Edited by: Christina Parolin, Robyn Westcott
Publication date: November 2006
Humanities Research is an internationally peer-reviewed journal published by the Research School of Humanities at The Australian National University. The Research School of Humanities came into existence in January 2007 and consists of the Humanities Research Centre, Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, National Europe Centre and Australian National Dictionary Centre. Launched in 1997, issues are thematic with guest editors and address important and timely topics across all branches of the humanities.
This issue of Humanities Research presents a selection of papers offered to the ‘Britishness & Otherness: Locating Marginal White Identities in the Empire’ symposium, convened at the Humanities Research Centre at The Australian National University in July 2004. The symposium was designed to provoke a more sustained and nuanced contemplation of the mechanisms by which a plethora of British identities circulated within the Empire. Moreover, participants were encouraged to question the assumption that ‘Britishness’ was a static cultural identity accessed easily and equally by all phenotypically similar (i.e. white skinned) subjects of the British Empire.
Award winner
The Coalition for Western Women’s History, has awarded Sarah Carter’s article “Britishness, ‘Foreignness’, Women and Land in Western Canada 1890s-1920s” in Humanities Research Vol XIII. No. 1. 2006, the 17th Annual Joan Jensen – Darlis Miller Prize for the best article published in 2006 in the field of History of Women and Gender in the Trans-Mississippi West.
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Informative Psychometric Filters »
Authored by: Robert A. M. Gregson
Publication date: August 2006
This book is a series of case studies with a common theme. Some refer closely to previous work by the author, but contrast with how they have been treated before, and some are new. Comparisons are drawn using various sorts of psychological and psychophysiological data that characteristically are particularly nonlinear, non-stationary, far from equilibrium and even chaotic, exhibiting abrupt transitions that are both reversible and irreversible, and failing to meet metric properties. A core idea is that both the human organism and the data analysis procedures used are filters, that may variously preserve, transform, distort or even destroy information of significance.
Humanities Research: Volume XII. No. 1. 2005 »
Bigotry and Religion in Australia 1865- 1950
Edited by: Benjamin Penny
Publication date: May 2006
Humanities Research is an internationally peer-reviewed journal published by the Research School of Humanities at The Australian National University. The Research School of Humanities came into existence in January 2007 and consists of the Humanities Research Centre, Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, National Europe Centre and Australian National Dictionary Centre. Launched in 1997, issues are thematic with guest editors and address important and timely topics across all branches of the humanities.
This collection of essays examines manifestations of bigotry on the basis of religion in the period from the latter part of the nineteenth century until the aftermath of the second world war. It includes articles concerning both prejudice directed against one religious group as in the case of anti-semitism, as well as inter-religious bigotry, particularly conflict between Protestant and Catholic Christians. Some papers address specific incidents that took place under very particular local conditions while others analyse patterns of discrimination over the broad sweep of time; some examine prejudice in face-to-face situations and others in academic discourse. In other words, we have attempted to include as many different manifestations of the many tentacled beast that is religious bigotry as we have been able. In this way we hope to bring into clearer focus the situation in present-day Australian society, to trace important social changes, to provide historical contexts for current manifestations of religious prejudice, and to examine specific incidents or practices, or patterns of discrimination and prejudice, in our past.
This issue of Humanities Research is sponsored by the Herbert and Valmae Freilich Foundation, a part of the Humanities Research Centre of ANU devoted to research into all forms of prejudice and discrimination.
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El Lago Español »
Authored by: O.H.K. Spate
Publication date: April 2006
En sentido estricto, “el Pacífico” no existió como tal hasta que en 1520-21 Fernao de Magalhãis, más conocido como Magallanes, atravesó la enorme extensión de aguas que entonces recibieron su nombre». Con estas palabras, el historiador y geógrafo de origen británico Oskar Spate presenta su versión del proceso en el que ese inmenso vacío se transforma en centro de las relaciones globales. El lago español describe el éxito esencialmente europeo y americano en convertir ese espacio en el nexo del poder económico y militar.
Este trabajo es una historia del Pacífico, el océano que se convirtió en el escenario del poder y el conflicto conformado por la política de Europa y el contexto económico de la América española. Sólo podía haber un concepto de «el Pacífico» una vez establecido el límite y el contorno del océano y esto era, indudablemente, trabajo de europeos. Cincuenta años después de la Conquista, Nueva España y Perú fueron la base desde donde el océano conformó virtualmente un lago español.
The Spanish Lake »
Authored by: O.H.K. Spate
Publication date: November 2004
‘Strictly speaking, there was no such thing as “the Pacific” until in 1520-1 Fernao de Magalhãis, better known as Magellan, traversed the huge expanse of waters, which then received its name.’
With these opening words, Oskar Spate launches his account of the process by which the greatest blank on the map became a focus of global relations. The Spanish Lake describes the essentially European and American achievement of turning this emptiness into a nexus of economic and military power.
This work is a history of the Pacific, the ocean that became a theatre of power and conflict shaped by the politics of Europe and the economic background of Spanish America. There could only be a concept of ‘the Pacific’ once the limits and lineaments of the ocean were set and this was undeniably the work of Europeans. Fifty years after the Conquista, Nueva España and Peru were the bases from which the ocean was turned into virtually a Spanish lake.
Oskar Spate was born and educated in England where he completed a doctorate at the University of Cambridge in 1937 on the development of London. After the Second World War he combined lecturing in England with writing a regional geography of the Indian sub-continent.
In 1951 he took up the post of Foundation Professor of Geography in the Research School of Pacific Studies at The Australian National University, a position he held until 1967. From 1967 to 1972 he was Director of the Research School of Pacific Studies, ANU, and in 1972 moved to its Department of Pacific History.
Throughout his career, Oskar Spate published a wide diversity of papers and essays on such subjects as the geography of Europe, South Asia and Australia and the exploration of Australia and the Pacific. Upon his retirement in 1976, he devoted most of his energies to researching and writing his three-volume history The Pacific since Magellan.