Aṭupotdeṇiya Ṭӓmpiṭavihāra, Gampaha District

Folklore says that the revenue collector of the Hāpiṭigam Kōralē area during the Dambadeṇi period constructed this ṭämpiṭavihāra. The village where it is located was the main supplier of ola leaf that were used for manuscripts during that era. The ṭämpiṭavihāra has an unusually long cella, both exterior and interior walls of it had murals. Only faint traces of the murals on the exterior wall remain. The cella has a seated Buddha image, two standing Buddha images, and images of gods Vishnu and Skandha. The ṭämpiṭavihāra is situated 7.3 km north of Mīrigama town, off Mīrigama-Giriulla-Alawwa road.

Kӓkulandaḷa Ṭӓmpiṭavihāra, Kalutara District

This vihara is on an elevated location on Kalavellawa road, beyond the town of Agalawatta. It is assumed that Siriwardana Dēvapatirāja, a minister to either/both Parākramabāhu VI (1412– 1467) or Bhuvanikabāhu VI (1470– 1478) of the Kōṭṭē period, had sponsored the construction of the ṭämpiṭavihāra with the guidance of a monk named Kuragama Thērō. There are images of the minister and the monk painted on either side of the door on the inner surface of the front wall of the ätulgäba. In addition, there are murals of arhants, five on each wall, and a single seated image of the Buddha in the cella. These murals and the image may belong to the nineteenth century, based on their stylistic traits. The roughly square-shaped image-chamber is raised just two feet above the ground by nine short pillars and the ambulatory is placed on the ground level. There is no additional maṇḍapa in the front of the structure. The ambulatory has a parapet wall on the back and sides and its front is fully open, except for two wooden columns supporting the front eave of the hip-roof. Seven stone columns, four on the corners and one each on the sides and the back support the rest of the roof eaves.

Mӓṭikoṭamulla Ṭӓmpiṭavihāra, Gampaha District

This ṭämpiṭavihāra is situated in a vihara on Ässella road off Waḍumulla junction, about 2.5 km off Vēyangoḍa-Minuwangoḍa road. It was built by the local community in 1862. This date indicates that the ṭämpiṭavihāra tradition continued into the end of the nineteenth century. The ṭämpiṭavihāra is constructed on a short plinth. Only the sanctum is raised on stone pillars.

Before he became one of the prominent figures of French sociology, Maurice Halbwachs studied, first with Bergson, and later taught, philosophy. As a student of the École Normale Supérieure, which he entered in 1898, he was awarded third place in the agrégation de philosophie in 1901. He taught philosophy in the lycées (high schools) of Reims and Tours (until 1914) and Nancy (during World War I), before becoming a maître de conférences (a status more or less equivalent to that of an associate professor), in philosophy, at the University of Cæn. Shortly afterward, he obtained a newly created chair of Education and Sociology at the University of Strasbourg, a chair he held from 1919 to 1922, until it was transformed into the first full professorship of “sociology” (without addition or qualification) in France. He joined the Sorbonne in 1935.

Some of Halbwachs's first publications, and a number of later ones, were in philosophical journals, even though he had joined the editorial team of L’Année sociologique (led by Durkheim) as early as 1905. (This was not uncommon; Durkheim himself had published on a regular basis in such periodicals; and many of the first French sociologists had a philosophical background.)

His links with the philosophical milieu were not severed, as his regular contributions to the Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger and to the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale clearly show; in August 1916, his sister Jeanne married Michel Alexandre, who would later become professor of philosophy at Louis le Grand and Henri IV, the most famous lycées of Paris.

There are, strictly speaking, no philosophical works of Halbwachs; one cannot help noticing, though, that his interest for one particular philosopher — Leibniz, namely — never faltered. In 1907 he published an introductory work to his thought, simply entitled Leibniz; this work, which has since become almost impossible to find, met with some success, since it was published in two editions (the second augmented by about 30 pages), each one printed twice, and in a Spanish translation (1943). In what follows, we shall quote the second edition (1928, 1950). In 1935, Halbwachs agreed to direct the dissertation (“The Problem of the Limitation of Creatures in Leibniz”) of a former pupil of Michel Alexandre, Bernard Gertzberg, whose untimely demise at the age of 22 led to its posthumous publication — with a short preface by Halbwachs (Gertzberg, 1937).

The Concept of Image-house in Buddhist Architecture

Buildings found in Buddhist monasteries in Sri Lanka fall into a tripartite division – ritual, ecclesiastical, and residential – signifying the Buddha, the doctrine, and the monastic order, respectively (Bandaranayake 1974, 27). The three main ritualistic buildings – the stūpa, the bōdhi-tree shrine, and the image-house – essentially preserve the memory of the Buddha. The stūpa enshrines his bodily relics. The bōdhi tree (vruksha chētiya) is associated with his Enlightenment, and finally, the image-house, through anthropomorphic imagery, symbolizes the Buddha himself. From its very inception, Sri Lankan Buddhist monastic architecture focuses ritual-and-architectural attention on these three shrines.

The main purpose of these shrines is then to provide an opportunity for devotees to evoke the memory of their Master, experience his ‘living’ presence, pay respect to him, and draw spiritual inspiration from him. These shrines are neither designed for congregational worship (although they could accommodate many devotees) nor intended to mediate (through priestly intervention or mediation) between the devotee and the sacred presence. In keeping with the Buddhist doctrine, the informed devotional practice is purely between the individual devotee and the object of his/her devotion (Bandaranayake 1974, 138). Thus, in both ritualistic and architectural sense, these shrines essentially re-enact the memory of the Buddha, his virtues, and his spiritual motivations.

In this context, the image-house occupies a special position both on account of its ritualistic primacy and its utilitarian purpose by effectively reminding a devotee of the Master's presence. The stūpa and the bōdhi tree, though more sacred as per Buddhist scriptures, represent the Buddha in an indirect way, which does not immediately bring him to mind. As many Buddhist texts record, the Buddha's presence evoked amazement, awe, and a sense of devotion among lay believers: they tried to absorb a fraction of his sublimeness merely by gazing at him, and this resulted in ecstasy, worship, and endowing him with offerings (Silva 1988, 212). People ultimately desired to have an image-shrine that represented the Buddha and to pay reverence when he was away from the monastery. The Buddha did not grant this: the Enlightened One passes into a non-apprehensible state at the end of his life, never to be reborn, and in truth, no one would see him.

Tennessee Williams emerged from obscurity and poverty suddenly, almost overnight on December 26, 1944, when the Lyric Theatre in Chicago opened The Glass Menagerie.txt. That opening catapulted the impoverished, struggling writer to stardom.1 Williams called it “a memory play,” which he began working on in June of 1943 as a story about a young girl not unlike his sister Rose, with whom he was very close, who would finally undergo a highly experimental prefrontal lobotomy in 1943 to treat her worsening mental disorder. The barbaric, “ice pick” procedure designed to insure her docility left her institutionalized for the remainder of her life. A rejected screenplay at MGM studios, “The Gentleman Caller,” and a short story, “Portrait of a Girl in Glass” (published in 1948), featuring a glass- collecting introvert named Laura who takes refuge in repeatedly listening to old music on a 1920s Victrola, were the play's prototypes. These became, then, in subsequent years, The Glass Menagerie, Rose Williams transformed to the equally fragile Laura Winfield, herself the prized unicorn in her magic kingdom, her collection of glass figurines. As Williams suggests in his notes to the play, Laura (Rose) “is like a piece of her own glass collection, too exquisitely fragile to move from the shelf “ (cited in the New York Times obituary of Rose). The story and play set the tone for a life's work that would be personal, autobiographical, and more poetical and symbolic than realistic or naturalistic. The play's staging was precedent breaking, featuring slide projections and nonrealistic, often dreamlike lighting and was finally more about memories of failed fatherhood (or parenthood) than about the failures of capitalist economics, although the latter was not without pertinence in an America still emerging from the Great Depression.

This chapter's main goal is to build a portrait of the sociology of memory in Italy as it developed from the theoretical-conceptual framework developed by Maurice Halbwachs in his pioneering volumes on the relationships between memory and society. The reflection on the sociology of memory in Italy is preceded by an analysis of Halbwachs's theoretical proposal, as presented in his three volumes specifically dedicated to memory, and by the historical reception of Halbwachian work in the Italian sociological debate.

Maurice Halbwachs, Sociologist of Memory

Halbwachs's studies outlining the social origins of memory concerned a large part of his intellectual life. They developed in particular in the years following World War I, mainly during his time teaching at the University of Strasbourg, where he worked between 1919 and 1935 (Craig 1979). In 1919 Halbwachs was appointed to the chair of sociology and pedagogy, succeeding Georg Simmel, who had occupied it from 1914 until his death in 1918. In Strasbourg, Halbwachs experienced years of intense intellectual activity and established fruitful links with the psychologist Charles Blondel and the founders of the Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. In these years, under the influence of the particularly rich and stimulating intellectual and cultural climate – Strasbourg was, for example, an important meeting place for German and French sociologists, where new and cross-disciplinary problems were generated (Guth and Pfefferkon 2019) – Halbwachs undertook the project of studying memory, understood as a collective mental act. It was a project that had already surfaced in a not entirely explicit form in several pieces of writing prior to his time in Strasbourg: his first reflections on the role the past plays in social life actually appear in some articles from 1905, specifically La psychologie de l’ouvrier moderne d’aprés Bernstein (Halbwachs 1905a) and Remarques sur la position du probléme sociologique des classes (Halbwachs 1905b), and in his work La classe ouvriére et les niveaux de vie (Halbwachs 1912).

Halbwachs therefore devoted himself to the subject of memory for a long time and until his death in the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945.

Maurice Halbwachs's career is characterized by a special concern for how statistics can be useful to sociological analyses. He even published a book entirely dedicated to the study of the work of mathematician Adolphe Quetelet and, in particular, of what he called “moral statistics.” The importance of Quetelet's work in the development of early sociology, more specifically through Émile Durkheim and the Durkheimians, who considered it as useful but often incomplete and incorrect, is without any doubt what incited Halbwachs to comment on its scope and limits. It is indeed in continuity to Durkheim's own criticisms of Quetelet that Halbwachs formulated his own. This chapter will present the main elements of Halbwachs's analysis of Quetelet's moral statistics. It will also discuss his subsequent work dealing with statistics, most notably his articles on statistical experimentation and probabilities and on the use of statistics in sociology. As Halbwachs was highly critical of Quetelet's interpretation of statistical means in the social sciences, this chapter will insist on the specific differences in their respective methodological frameworks for the study of the social world. It will also present Halbwachs's concerns about the proper uses of statistics in social analyses.

Since the 1990s, Maurice Halbwachs (1877– 1945) is mostly known as a theoretician of collective memory (Hirsch 2016, 79– 81). Less well known are his contributions on the interpretation of social statistics. This is surprising as he dedicated a great number of books and articles to either applying or theorizing on statistics (Martin 1999, 71). This chapter will thus seek to analyze Halbwachs's extensive criticism of mathematician Adolphe Quetelet (1796– 1874) and, more specifically, of the latter's interpretation of what he called “moral statistics.” It will also show how Halbwachs's idea of the uses and interpretations of statistics was refined over time, as he gained a better understanding of its scope and limits (Alexandre 1949, 5).

Halbwachs's Interest for Social Statistics in Continuity with Durkheim’s

After being influenced by his early teacher, philosopher Henri Bergson (1859– 1941), Halbwachs met Francois Simiand (1873– 1935), who will become a friend and colleague.

Tennessee Williams may never have been the playwright we thought he was, or, at least, there has always been a Tennessee Williams we knew and understood (or thought we did) and a Williams we didn’t. That division may be between early and late Williams, or between the Actors Studio Williams and a more poetical, lyrical Williams, or between, say, the Williams of A Streetcar Named Desire and the Williams of The Two- Character Play. He was, it seems, always more lyrically Chekov than grittily Zola. His sin, if sin at all, was to have peaked too soon, as Gordon Rogoff reminds us, and thereby to have raised expectations in his audiences and among those handlers on whom theater relies, often strangers upon whose kindness Williams, too, depended (Rogoff, 2000, 59).

Opening a roundtable discussion on Williams's late plays in 2002,1 however, Annette Saddik outlines a continuous thread between Williams's acknowledged successes and what we have come to think of as the later or lesser- known efforts:

In the introduction of this book, a number of examples of contemporary relevance were referred to and, at times, directly pointed out. Upon reading the book, however, not only did these given examples bear a number of unpalatable social truths but also the case studies set out have, hopefully, inspired more connections and insights into similar events and thus provided warnings about what should be done to prevent such occurrences happening again. The need to privatise and make profit was an obvious yet dangerous connection to bear in mind. So too was the State's role as a lawmaker and its ability to legally justify its actions no matter how destructive they may have been. Nevertheless, there are other warnings and caveats that need to be taken on board.

Historical Warnings

As intimated in the introduction of Chapter One, the introductory passage on contemporary relevance should not be allowed to denigrate or degrade the relevance of the book's more historical examples such as the Aberfan disaster where NCB mismanagement caused 144 deaths and untold misery for families and survivors. Full recompense (not the measly sum that was reluctantly paid) still needs to be pursued even if it is 54 years later. The avoidance of paying for the disaster, the misuse of charitable funds and the costing of children's lives at £8.06 per child amply demonstrated the gravity of capitalist/neoliberal trains of reasoning that still exist to this day. Likewise, the effects of the Flint Water Crisis in the United States, which has ongoing problems associated with lead poisoning, resulting – up to 2015 – in the death of at least 12 people alongside a concomitant increase in foetal mortalities is another revelation worthy of extensive deliberation. There is little doubt that these deaths were a result of neoliberal financial logic. And it is this tragic logic that is revealed as a warning by the case study concerned. So too are the lessons that should have, but have not been, learnt by the United States and local governments.

To reiterate, the more contemporary examples cited in this book should not be allowed to degrade the investigations into either the corruption within the DRC or the revelations pertaining to organised gang-like activities of the UN peacekeepers in Bosnia.

Children's rights are a key reference point for common understandings of kid power. The history of children's rights goes back to the early twentieth century, with intermittent international commitment to supporting children's welfare (Wyness, 2019). There was a libertarian moment in the 1970s when a group of academics argued that children should be empowered to escape the ‘shackles of childhood’ by offering them a range of civil and political rights (Holt, 1975; Farson, 1978). However, it is the relatively recent version of children's rights, the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which has had most impact, heightening – sometimes controversially – the position and condition of children globally. The CRC is a legal document obligating nation states to respect the integrity and status of children as human beings. It has been ratified by all UN member countries, except the United States, and adopted by a multitude of national and international agencies, resulting in children becoming an integrated part of the global discourse on childhood. The global focus has been on children's rights to provision, protection and participation (Franklin and Franklin, 1996), with the latter often singled out as a distinctive and controversial feature of the CRC. Participatory rights have sometimes been associated with an increase in child power and a shift in power relations between children and adults. This chapter explores the question of whether the greater global focus on children and their rights has led to an increase in kid power.

The chapter focuses on two related themes in teasing out the difficulty of equating rights with power. First, the CRC developed as a result of increasing realisation of the suffering of children in conflicts and in poor living conditions due to their age-related vulnerability. Consequently, it emphasises the role of adults, institutions and states providing for and protecting children:

In this book, we have set out to explore the notion of kid power, both as it is understood more conventionally and as we believe it should more fully be analysed and recognized. In Section 1, we concentrated on the former. We argued, in Chapters 2– 4, that a conventional conception of kid power which emphasises the rise of children's power at the expense of adults, offers a limited understanding of the power dynamics between adults and children. Furthermore, kid power is, in many ways, complicated by the growing attention to adult ‘responsibility’ within policy and practices. Chapter 2 discussed the rights agenda, which has placed a much higher premium on adults’ ‘caretaker role’ in relation to children. It described a set of global expectations that adults and institutions oversee and monitor children's welfare and well-being, as well as provide limited channels through which children have some involvement in the latter. However, adults have a regulatory role and implicit responsibility, leading to more complex configurations of generational power than the conventional idea of adults having overt power over children. Furthermore, while the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child challenges the view that adults retain power over children in terms of viewing children as property, in the majority of countries parents still retain the capacity to physically chastise their children. In addition, children's rights are often conceptualised rather unidimensionally and discursively, as them ‘having a voice’, leaving other dimensions and more material contributions less explored.

Chapter 3 focused on the role of teachers controlling and regulating children's educational and cognitive development at a distance. Childcentred education is increasingly becoming a norm globally, albeit there is large variation as to how it is perceived and practiced. Child-centred education represents a departure from earlier forms of teacher-centred pedagogy and opens up spaces, especially for young children, to express themselves. However, as we have argued, this should not be confused with a redistribution of power to children, as adults continue to construct spaces through which education and development are merged, underwriting children's emotional, cognitive and educational growth.

All along his researches, Halbwachs addressed the issue of causality, as he did for social space and social time (see in the present volume, Chapter 1, “Collective Memory”). For the young philosopher introduced to Kant's Critique de la raison pure by his two masters Henri Bergson and Émile Durkheim, involved in the European neo-Kantian movement of the beginning of the twentieth century, like his German homologous, Ernst Cassirer.

Causality, time, or space where a priori to be investigated, if not like Mauss and Durkheim in 1903 (and then Durkheim, 1912) for the two last, but at least scrutinizing causality by means of mathematical improvements related to probabilities or philosophy of science. Three steps may be found in his inquiries. First, there were the two dissertations (1913a, 1913b), the core on the working-class conditions of life and the complementary one on Quetelet's theory of average man. Second, Halbwachs left notebooks where we can find his peregrinations among the works of earlier contributors to the history of the mathematics of probabilities, or reflexions on very recent publications like for instance this comment on some information he got after the publication of Werner Heisenberg's article on his theorem of uncertainty in quantum physics (1927), left in his first note book (94):

Chapter one deals with the disasters that occurred in Aberfan and Grenfell. In the Welsh pit village of Aberfan, there were 144 deaths (116 of which were children at school) as a result of slippage from the coal tips surrounding the areas of habitat and education within the proximity. Corporate crime and the lack of prosecutions or attributable blame are duly exposed in this study. So too is the social harm that was inflicted as a result of the National Coal Board's negligent management of the Merthyr Vale Colliery and its lands.

The Grenfell disaster resulted in 72 deaths as a malfunctioning fridge-freezer caused a blaze that swept through a tower block of flats in London. Policy questions about safety regulations allow the case study to provide an unwelcome insight into the inequalities in Britain that should not have come about, particularly when the piece considers austerity and the resultant policy impacts on social housing and expenditure costs. Poignantly, it is argued that these impacts have formed a strong demonstration of how the incident at Grenfell should be construed as an economic State crime and thus be prosecuted as such.

Overall, these two case studies collectively represent a clear example of what can occur when the lessons of history are ignored. In both studies, potentially fatal issues with health and safety in the United Kingdom were brought to the attention of those in authority and were subsequently ignored as the victim's interests were not considered to be as expedient as the dominant corporate interest. While both these cases can be and often are referred to as disasters, it is important to note that – as will become apparent – there was potential for both to be avoided. Warnings were issued in both circumstances and were not heeded. Communities were seen as dispensable and profit was put before safety and human lives. Crucially, both studies reveal the atrocious attempts by government agencies to obfuscate or delay ensuing inquiries and reports. Indeed, such inexcusable behaviour amply demonstrates the fact that the perpetrators of these social harms were aware not only of what they had done but also of how these events affected their image and the image of official governance.

President Biden has ambitious plans for the US economy. Biden's “Made in America” plan aims to pour public investment into manufacturing, as well as research and development, in order to respond to domestic concerns about unfair global competition and off-shoring US jobs. These policies, however, inasmuch as they prioritize US economic interests over competing interests in other countries, are likely to run afoul of international treaty commitments made over the past 25 years. In this, Biden will be in good company—joining a community of world leaders attempting to meet the needs of their domestic constituents within the constraints of the global trading system.

There is clearly an unresolved tension between the network of rules that make up the global trading system and the individual members of that system. The system of global trade is made up of one overarching set of multilateral trade agreements, more than 300 preferential free trade agreements and almost 3,000 bilateral investment treaties. The primary rationale for these trade and investment agreements is to establish a stable regulatory environment in which protectionist national interests are neutralized in favor of a more optimal distribution of global wealth. They have the ostensibly unbiased role of paving the way for global commerce so that economic growth takes place as quickly and efficiently as possible. National governments, on the other hand, must constantly respond to changing circumstances through new laws and regulations. They aim at increasing economic diversification and development, maintaining financial stability and fiscal solvency, protecting vulnerable populations, providing affordable access to medicines, and responding quickly and agilely to domestic and global crises.

Troubling trends in treaty-making and international jurisprudence, however, suggest that global rules increasingly present obstacles to national governments pursuing these aims. While the original project of liberalizing international trade was focused on lowering tariffs and nontariff border measures among as many nations as possible, while allowing them to regulate as they like, treaty texts since the mid-1990s have encroached more and more on domestic policymaking. As this volume highlights, this encroachment takes place in industrial and investment policy, capital flow management and debt policy, as well as health and climate policy.