Did the ancients have the concept of nationhood? To raise that question is to enter a minefield. The issue of what counts as a nation has generated a flood of articles and monographs, mostly by anthropologists and sociologists, with a smattering by historians.

The very idea of a nation or nationhood has been preeminently associated with modern history. Its relevance for antiquity is not obvious and has prompted much debate. Those who see it as an exclusively modern phenomenon tend to associate it with the creation of new polities in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century as nation-states. Others, however, and they have been growing in number, argue that the existence of a unifying consciousness of affinity, kinship, and shared history goes back to antiquity and amounts to nationhood or whatever one wishes to call it.

Two aspects of identity shaped the lives of women, men, and children in the Song more than anything else: gender and generation. Gender determined an individual’s place and role both within the family and in society. Generation – position in a descent line – defined an individual’s place and role within the family, and this was also reflected in society. Some individuals and groups lived outside the molds created by gender and generation – Buddhist and Daoist nuns and monks, for example – but these exceptions highlight the norms. Legal cases and government law codes inform us about the official structures that circumscribed daily life in marriage, family, and community. Other sources, such as funerary inscriptions, biographies, and anecdotal collections, allow us to flesh out both the customary and the extraordinary practices of marriage and family life. Extrafamilial relationships, such as those of men and courtesans, friendships between women and between men are also important features of individual social and emotional engagement with others. Due to reticent sources, we know far less about childhood. Ideas of gender, marriage, and family among the Khitan and Jurchen differed greatly from those of Song people, and encounters between and among them generated new configurations for all.

Research on society and environment has a rich history that is challenging to access. We define socio-environmental research as structured inquiry about the reciprocal relationships between society and environment. It has evolved from early observational expeditions to today’s data-intensive, interdisciplinary work. We assemble readings from the late 1700s to the mid-1990s to showcase this legacy and organize readings into chapters. Each chapter is introduced by a prominent scholar, who discusses the context key insights. Considered over time, readings suggest certain research themes have endured, forming lineages: a focus on populations and their resource bases, sustainable management of common-pool resources, society and land, technology, and systems. As a guide, this anthology can help new researchers gain a basic vocabulary and overview of different research traditions. Current researchers can learn different ways to conceptualize society–environment relationships, supporting interdisciplinary teams. For specialists in socio-environmental research, the readings can stimulate new questions and illuminate the historic nature of contemporary ideas and concerns.

In 2018, Lauren Alaina released her single “Ladies in the ’90s,” which takes a nostalgic look at her childhood through cleverly chosen lyrics from chart-topping songs of the 1990s. “Ladies in the ’90s” references women—and only women—from country music, as well as pop, rock, and R&B. The song establishes Lauren Alaina’s broad musical lineage and evokes nostalgia for an earlier decade. This chapter explores the performative and affective use of nostalgia and lineage in country music. A close reading of “Ladies in the ’90s” reveals how the generation of country artists coming of age in the second decade of the twenty-first century are redefining and expanding the stylistic, cultural, and even racial boundaries of the genre through the nostalgic tropes that have been used for decades in country music. In so doing, artists like Lauren Alaina are challenging the industry and carving out new musical and narrative spaces.

In this chapter we will examine how key institutions were mobilized to shape China’s early modern business practices under weak state engagement of the economy, and a growing foreign presence. Business practices in the late imperial period rested on four pillars, each a fundamental part of the institutional framework that structured social and economic life. The first, family, provided templates for the utilization of capital and labor and the mobilization of trust, tools that proved as useful for China’s late imperial commercial economy as for the early modern economy of industrial enterprise and global engagement. The second might be termed the system of private ordering that served generations of Chinese merchants and others in combining capital and establishing the terms of economic interaction, often through written contracts whose provisions established highly flexible forms of partnership that continued to form the basis of most Chinese business until the early PRC. The third, native place, in significant ways mirrored the intangible assets provided by ties of kinship, offering a predetermined basis for co-operation, nurturing and protecting group interests and skills and, like the fourth, grounding these intangibles in very tangible organizations catering to inhabitants of a particular city, region, or province.

Are legal traditions incommensurable? Professor H. Patrick Glenn argued that the idea that legal traditions were not suitable for comparison was a result of the reification of cultures. This chapter discusses Glenn’s insights of tradition and commensurability by examining the variants of the concepts and practices of lineage property in historical Confucianism. In the Confucian sphere of influence, marked by the shared precept of ancestral worship and primacy of ritual obligation, legal developments concerning lineage organization and property converged and diverged, revealing the complexity in humanity’s efforts to respond to the various challenges it faced. This examination illustrates Glenn’s central idea that legal traditions of the world are not only comparable and translatable but also transplantable. Transformation and transmission of law in East Asia underscore the need to compare legal traditions, both within and without in all its independence and interdependence, and further to understand the past in its own terms in all the interconnectedness of autonomous dimensions of life at a given time.

Possession of land, noble lineage and martial prowess was, in theory, a sine qua non for participating in the Latin west’s politics. Yet forms of political organisation diversified: by the late middle ages, urban leaders and the ‘commons’ had forced their way into many political communities, with access to commercial wealth playing an ever more important role. Monarchies, principalities, ecclesiastical polities and city states alike relied on written procedures underpinned by elaborate laws. Legal knowledge and access to the ruler’s court became foundations of elite hegemony – alongside military power which was itself changing, as war taxation and the means of raising armies grew more complex. Education allowed some to rise through administrative service or the law. Despite the attempts of aristocratic military elites to shore up their hegemony, the political culture of most of Latin Christendom was flexible enough to let merchants, lawyers and scholars join or partner those elites in ways that would have been unimaginable in the early middle ages.

Between the ninth and sixteenth centuries, crests (mon) evolved from ornamental motifs to potent signifiers of social and political identity. Japanese warriors borrowed the use of stylized decorative motifs from the aristocracy, eventually transforming them into full-fledged heraldic markers. Scholars have explained this evolution in fundamentally military terms: absent uniforms, mon enabled warriors to distinguish friends from foes on chaotic battlefields. Yet twelfth- to fourteenth-century representations, in war tales and illustrated scrolls, reveal that the diffusion of mon accelerated in peacetime. Growing attention to mon in sources largely reflects the narrative logics of the various genres: mon served to commemorate battlefield deeds rather than organize military action. Indeed, the impetus for their diffusion was genealogical ‒ a manifestation of the contemporaneous restructuring of warrior society around the corporate warrior house (ie). The ie came to represent the fundamental unit of affiliation for Japanese warriors, with its emphasis on shared ancestry and its hierarchy of lineages and sub-lineages. Mon served as powerful visual markers of the unity and flexibility of these new kinship and political groups, providing a language to represent minute variations of identity and status in a society keenly attentive to both.

Chapter 1 explores the relationship between ideas of race and the understanding of the past in the first half of the eighteenth century. The emphasis is placed on the notion of race as a way of defining a group’s cultural heritage. It is argued that, for many authors, its meaning was akin to that of lineage or genealogy and therefore distant from the modern, ‘biological’ meaning. The significant aspect is that race was understood as a product of history, slowly changing through time mainly thanks to education; but it was also a frame for a collective narrative inasmuch as it implied the passing down of memories, myths, and symbols from one generation to the next, thus creating a historical community. Investigating and dissecting the ethnic narrative of the nobility, the chapter goes on to argue that this was made to coincide with the French national narrative through a rhetoric of sacrifice. It was the reference to the sacrifices made in the name of the nation that confirmed, at least for its advocates, the identity of the interests of the nobility with those of the nation at large. Attention is brought to the complex game of rejections and borrowings between the opposing groups and to the similarities in the underlying mechanism of representation/identification with the nation.

A sculpture of a golden hand in one of the busiest districts in Lisbon is a memorial meant to invoke Borges’s Portuguese origins - about which he wrote a poem, ’Los Borges’. Borges possessed extensive knowledge of Portuguese culture and was willing to use that knowledge to locate himself as part of European universalizing traditions. His knowledge ranged over Luis de Camões, Antero de Quental, Eça de Queiros, et al. He wrote a sonnet, ’A Camões’ and an essay on his work. Elsewhere, he claimed that his Portuguese lineage enabled him to grasp Pessoa’s writing more thoroughly. Saramago drew inspiration from Borges and imbued the Argentine writer’s tropes with a progressive slant. Borges’s influence also extends to the visual arts of Portugal and is present in a recent (2017) work of Portuguese fiction.