How much of a role can human dignity play in constitutional law? It can certainly serve as a foundation of some or all of the rights that a constitution comprises, and it may also figure in the specific content of some of these rights. It may do this explicitly or implicitly – implicitly (as in the US Constitution) when dignity’s role is brought out in legal argument rather than the explicit text. Most rights that protect freedom implicate dignity, but so also do social and economic rights in the constitutions that have them. More generally human dignity may serve as a constitutional value, guiding the interpretation of other provisions: it does this, for example, explicitly in the Constitution of South Africa. It may also underpin the constitutional protection of democracy and the franchise, the rule of law, structures of accountability, the importance of citizenship, and the overall orientation of the provisions of the constitution towards respect for the ordinary people of the country that it governs.

Warfare did not evolve in a linear fashion. This is most obvious on the physical level: the weapons and armies of polities across time and space have fluctuated in sophistication, so that early European medieval armies had more in common with ancient Israelite or Greek contingents than with the Roman war machinery, and, up to the nineteenth century or even the twentieth, raiding warfare in some parts of Africa or the islands of south-east Asia was akin to patterns of pre-Columbian warfare in the Americas, prehistoric warfare in Europe and ghazis and booty expeditions in Europe and around the Mediterranean. Where warfare’s aims went beyond mere raiding, for much of world history, the paucity or even absence of relevant sources has made it difficult to reconstruct political–strategic aims. We also encounter vast varieties conditioned in part by hard factors such as climate, geography and resources. We have encountered and possibly not always avoided the danger of squeezing cultural differences into a Procrustean bed of Western concepts and languages. Yet some striking patterns have emerged. Not only Indo-European cultures, but also Mongols and Chinese, came up with a strategic aim of establishing a universal monarchy, or defending against the imposition of such an overlordship. The forming of alliances for common strategic purposes and the defence of allies or clients is another widespread pattern, strategic co-operation counterbalancing long-term hostilities. The distinction between client states and allies was often blurred. Non-kinetic tools of strategy were also employed widely, from giving gifts, to tribute payments (again a distinction often difficult to make), to marriages to confirm peace treaties or cement alliances. And most cultures seem to have had some rules or code of honour with regard to the conduct of war which in many contexts imposed limits on the pursuit of strategic aims.

A foreword commenting on the anthropology of tax as a field of study and important topics for research. These include examining tax as the materialisation of value regimes and relations of power, as well as interrogating the work that goes into producing the fiscal subject.

The introductory chapter is a brief recap on the history and origins of wind power, from windmills in ancient times to today’s multi-megawatt turbines. Energy security has arguably been the historic driver for wind power, and it was a primary source of mechanical power until the advent of the Industrial revolution when it was superceded by coal and oil. The first electricity generating wind turbines were built in the late nineteenth centry, and the technology was pursued most vigorously in Denmark, a country with limited energy reserves: the role of this country in creating the modern wind turbine is described. The worldwide energy crisis of the 1970s brought wind power into the frame internationally, and the pivotal role of legislation under President Carter in expanding the market for wind energy in the US and elsewhere is outlined. Since then the rationale for wind power has expanded to include climate change and the technology has grown exponentially in terms of global installation of wind power and the physical size of wind turbines. The chapter concludes by introducing some of the technological steps that have enabled this process, and which are detailed in subsequent chapters.

This chapter contributes an ethnographic case study on the creation of international tax norms at the OECD during the ‘Base Erosion Profit Shifting’ initiative. I argue that what makes countries share taxing rights and multinational corporations give money, as in tax to specific jurisdictions and not to others, is not necessarily this ‘natural’ law of reciprocity, but changes to the dominant modes of relatedness, conversation, and presence in international tax norms. Tax scholars, but also recent anthropological studies on tax, explore taxes against a gift-exchange logic. I suggest that this conceptual obsession with mutual interest, return, and benefits obscures the fact that taxes are often unilateral monetary transactions. More generally, it overlooks the human capacity to give and provide, under specific conditions, without calculating or receiving something in return. While taxation is not a form of sharing, I argue that it is productive to pay attention to the many similarities between these two types of transfers. They share, at times as I show in the chapter, more commonalities than taxation and reciprocal gift exchanges, and there are moments when taxation facilitates and enables sharing.

In ‘The Place of Concepts in Socratic Inquiry’, Terence Irwin examines Socrates’ question ‘What is F?’, which is often taken to be a request for some sort of definition or account of what F is. When Socrates asks, ‘What is courage?’, ‘What is piety?’, ‘What is temperance?’, does his discovery that everyone, including himself, cannot answer such questions in a satisfactory manner imply that these answerers do not know what the words mean? If one cannot answer the ‘What is F?’ question, does it follow that one lacks the concept of F? Irwin argues that conceptual argument has an indispensable role in the arguments that lead to Socratic definitions, but it will not take us all the way to them. To understand Socratic definitions, Irwin compares them with Aristotelian real definitions, and with Epictetus’ views on the articulation of preconceptions.

To reduce the confusion that has often dogged conversations about stress and illness, this chapter discusses the key terms and concepts. It then discusses some of the key dilemmas that have made the study of stress and illness a complex and sometimes troubled scientific journey. This discussion lays the groundwork for understanding what we know and don’t know, toward a clearer view of what challenges lie ahead for the translation of stress neuroscience into meaningful improvements in clinical practice for the benefit of patients with stress-related illnesses.

The editors create an agenda of themes for developing services and practitioners, and for research capable of responding to psychosocial aspects of emergencies, incidents, disasters, and disease outbreaks (EIDD) and their deleterious effects. Topics include the perspectives of scientists, practitioners, and the public, the historical importance of how current capabilities have developed, the critical theme of agreeing definitions, recognising the wellbeing, psychosocial, and mental health agendas that face survivors of EIDD in their recovery, the fallacies of basing planning on panic and the belief that survivors of subsequent EIDD fare better than first timers, and the importance of good communication within and between agencies and then with the public, and of teams and their leadership. It recognises the lessons from the social sciences, and the importance of social support, psychological safety, and our relationships in our recovery. This book strongly supports the notion that there is no health without mental health.

This chapter considers the components and organisation of civil protection. The first part of the chapter includes key definitions of terms. The second part defines and examines civil protection. The third part provides a critical review of the basis of emergency planning, and the fourth part looks at various aspects of emergency preparedness. Emergency planning is based on reference events from the past and, in the fifth part of the chapter, the key question of whether the past really is still an adequate guide to the future is addressed. The final part of the chapter looks at the growing field of risk and disaster science.

The chapter begins by looking at Beck’s theory of a Risk Society and how this has denied that risk is a term that can be applied to the ancient world. There is a survey of relevant work that has been carried out on uncertainty in antiquity, before the chapter examines how the term risk emerged and the various ways of defining the term. The chapter argues for a broader, cultural approach that sees risk as more than a modern numerical concept and the development of ideas concerning risk as a historical process.

The introduction explores what is at stake in Fantasy culture. It opens with a passage from a 1951 letter by J. R. R. Tolkien that expresses his aspirations and doubts, before exploring how Tolkien’s success served to catalyse a series of formations inspired in part by him but not bounded or limited by his conceptions. Through discussing Michael Moorcock’s essay ‘Epic Pooh’, the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, societies and awards in the 1970s, and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, it models Fantasy as a generative, ongoing conversation. The introduction then engages directly with questions of definition, considering the centrality of impossibility to a consensus about what Fantasy means, discussing important work by Brian Attebery and Farah Mendlesohn, and asserting that Fantasy is best understood as a complex assemblage of creators, audiences, languages, forms, conventions, tropes, communities, institutions, histories and traditions. It closes by arguing that dismissing Fantasy as an escapist form is both quixotic and myopic. People often have very good reasons to want to get outside dominant frameworks for a while, and they return from Fantasy worlds refreshed and with valuable new perspectives.

How do we define creativity? Studies of laypersons’ beliefs tend to find that people focus on malleability, aesthetic taste, insight, and curiosity. Experts, however, propose that for something to be creative it should be both novel or original and task-appropriate or useful. Although other criteria have been proposed, none has been as thoroughly adapted. After discussing why definitions do matter, I shift to theories that categorize creativity. I cover the classic model of the four Ps (Person, Product, Process, and Press) and then highlight a newer model that incorporates a sociocultural influence, the five As (Actor, Artifact, Action, Audience, and Affordances).

In this book we explore how different kinds of parasites affected the key civilizations that flourished across the world over the last 10,000 years. Ancient parasites can be recovered from mummies, skeletons, latrines, coprolites, and chamber pots. Analysis may involve microscopy, ELISA, proteomics, and recovery of DNA. A huge range of parasites can infect humans, ranging from helminths (worms), single-celled protozoa such as malaria and dysentery, and ectoparasites such as lice and fleas. Different parasites will have varying impact upon health depending upon the proportion of a society affected and the physiological consequences of infection upon the body. Here the concept of Disabilit-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) is employed to estimate the health impact of parasites in past societies, and compare them. This should allow us for the first time to propose which past civilizations may have experienced the greatest health burden from the parasites affecting their populations.

This introduction explains the nature and interest of the trolley problem since its introduction to the philosophical literature, followed by a chapter by chaptersummary of the individual contributions to the volume.

You are covering an obstetrics clinic for your colleague who left for vacation. A 30-year-old G2P1 at 37+2 weeks’ gestation by first-trimester sonogram presents for a prenatal visit. Screening tests revealed a male fetus with a low risk of aneuploidy and a normal second-trimester morphology sonogram. Maternal investigations were unremarkable in the first trimester. Your colleague’s note from a second-trimester prenatal visit details the counseling provided with regard to prior shoulder dystocia; a recent note indicates the intent to review management during this visit.

This chapter defines the term new speaker and develops arguments which support the claim that an emergent new perspective on minority language policy and multilingualism poses fresh challenges for official language and educational strategies. It sets forth the approach and methodology of the investigation and describes how data and evidence on language policy and the new speaker phenomenon have been gathered from official publications and an extensive range of interviews with politicians, senior civil servants, academics and civil society activists. Selected features of new speaker profiles are examined, as are the dynamics involved in seeking to integrate into a host community with an emphasis on issues of role models, authenticity, self-confidence, linguistic skills and opportunities to use the target language in safe, breathable spaces.