Fueled in part by the wealth created from digital currencies, major art dealers such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s have embraced the sale of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) attached to unique digital works of art. NFTs, how they are related to the blockchain, and the evolution of the market for digital art is the subject of this chapter. Despite recent decreases in value, it appears that digital art can be added to the growing list of uses for blockchain technology, which is now becoming a part of modern life. This chapter proceeds in five sections. First, the overview of the evolutionary progression of blockchain technology in the form of NFTs. Second, a description of the emergence of the market for digital art. Third, an explanation and historical account of digital art and related recent issues. Fourth, a coverage of the abrupt decline in the market price for many NFTs. And last, a conclusion, which focuses on how the dramatic extension of blockchain and other digital technology to the world of art represents a new and exciting platform for creative expression. This chapter offers a valuable addition to the literature by providing a readable introduction and overview of what is now known about the likely impact of blockchain technology and NFTs to art. Additionally, this important development should have a significant impact on the future of innovation and property law.

Chapter three turns to the recently conquered (1492) kingdom of Granada. In the late 1560s, the Crown began to use the Council of Trent as the justification to enact legislation that criminalized as heterodox facets of local culture. The native granadino community responded by launching a secessionist rebellion (the War of the Alpujarras, 1568-1571). The Crown eventually defeated the rebels, and as retribution forcibly removed the native community from Granada inland. Subsequently, those “moriscos” desiring to return to their homeland were required to petition and make the case that they would integrate with their “Old Christian” neighbors. Analyzing legal determinations made by the tribunal that assessed applications made by former residents, I show how the responsible magistrates incorporated standards of Christian citizenship defined in synods and councils in their decisions. I also reveal how in the battle over rights, early modern lawyers for dispossessed converts effectively employed legal arguments about prescriptive possession and therefore dominium over the identity category of Old Christian, which guaranteed society’s most extensive range of rights and privileges.

This chapter begins with a consideration of the importance to sovereignty of the right to deport. Beyond exploring what constitutes sovereignty and how such power is preserved and held, it examines why so little attention has been paid to life after expulsion. Expulsion (real or threatened) kidnaps time, creates unlimited forms of captivity, invigorates shame, normalizes violence, and stabilizes concepts such as citizenship and belonging. Showing the long buried links between colonial and US treatment of Indigenous peoples and contemporary deportation practices, the chapter reveals how knitted into the imaginary of belonging forced removal has become. While scholars have slowly begun exploring the experience of life after forced removal, writers of fiction have taken up the question as well and have begun offering portraits of the experience of navigating detention camps and rebuilding a life that might be sustainable after the violence of expulsion. Novels by Evangeline Parsons Yazzie, Lisa Ko, Helton Habila, Mohshin Hamid, and Jenny Erpenbeck are examined in detail because of their careful attention to living a deportable and deported life.

The nineteenth-century theorists of modern Romanist dominium, the great French treatise writers and the German Romanists, embarked in a quest for coherence, aspiring to develop a body of property law that was both normatively and conceptually coherent. These jurists sought to build an architecture of logically interrelated property doctrines informed by the unifying commitment to maximizing the owner’s freedom of action. Yet, this coherence was illusory. Far from being coherent, modern property was riven with tensions that could hardly be disguised. This chapter examines the jurists’ attempts to deal with four doctrines that threatened to strain the coherence of the property system: emphyteusis, possession, the limits on ownership and common ownership. While ultimately unsuccessful, these attempts are nonetheless worth exploring. For one thing, these failed attempts opened rifts in the apparently solid edifice of modern dominium, rifts that, a couple of decades later, the social critics will be quick to exploit. Most importantly, the jurists’ efforts to ease these tensions throw into sharp relief a diversity of ideological and methodological views that hardly surfaces in the nineteenth-century property treatises.

This chapter explores the nature of possession of property and what it means in the different contexts of personal property and land. Although the law characterises property in personal property or goods and in land in distinct ways, possession provides a shared conceptual link a party in possession of land or of personal property will generally have a right to protect that property against interference by any third party (except the true owner).

In the introduction we describe the “wicked” global property problem of homeless squatting on empty land or in empty properties and outline some key themes explored in the book. We reflect on the nature of squatting as a property problem; and introduce the concept of “scale,” which we deploy throughout the book to describe the dynamic nature of state responses to squatting. We outline the importance of seeing “the state” in the analyses of squatting and other property problems, through its interactions with individuals, interactions with other state-bodies, and interactions with its territory, and interactions with its own institutions. Finally, we set out the structure and approach followed in the book, including reference to five primary jurisdictions: the USA, Ireland, Spain, South Africa and England and Wales.

In Chapters 6–8, we examine how state responses to squatting, and the lenses through which the competing claims of stakeholders are seen, articulated, prioritized, and evaluated, frame debates about homeless squatting in empty land in the context of complex, competing, multi-scalar normative goals. In doing so, we continue to recognize that squatting conflicts are embedded in political, economic, cultural, social, and legal jurisdictional contexts, and that, in these contexts, assumed identities and characteristics are assigned to competing actors, as legal and extra-legal norms are applied to tackle problems and adjudicate conflicts. In this chapter we focus, firstly, on the conceptual and pragmatic meanings – and the “scaled production” – of possession in common law and civil law traditions. We then examine how the act of squatting, and the status of squatters, has been rescaled in recent years. On one axis, we read adaptations in state responses to property events – for example, the criminalization of squatting – as reflecting the upscaling or elevation of the squatting “event.” The criminalization of squatting – or any other erstwhile non-criminal activity – signals that a previously low-stake event has accrued high-stakes impact for the state. It reveals new or emerging pressures on the state to take “other-regarding” action, mediating directly between competing (erstwhile private) claims (for example, owners, squatters, investors, neighbors). And the nature of the state’s response signals to the alignment of particular resilience claims with the state’s (or the government’s) own resilience needs. In focusing on the problem of homeless squatting on empty land through the prism of the homeless squatter, we adopt the framing techniques discussed in Chapter 5: placing the squatter at the center of the network of competing stakeholders and examining the “webby relations” that shape, mediate and separate representations of squatters in accounts of homeless squatting on empty land.

Starting from a cognitive point of view, this paper provides an entirely new reading of the dances and chants of the Salian priests. By focusing on their dances and chants in the perspective of embodied cognition and by putting a diligent analysis of (a) the reports and (b) the prayer texts into historical comparisons with other ‘prophetic’ practices of that time, this study is able to elucidate the Salian performances as body techniques that go beyond a mere facilitation of sociality. These techniques alter the practitioners’ states of mind and thereby elicit an experience that one may call religious experience, divine experience, or ‘possession’.

This chapter examines cultural exchange, change, and continuity through the lens of population movement: migration, immigration, refugees, displacement, diaspora, and the modes of transportation that brought diverse people into direct engagement with each other.

Empathy and dissociation form a paradoxical and dynamic fusion of opposites in the creative trance. Inherently structured by its domain, cultural traditions, personal preferences, and rules to achieve excellence, the creative trance is an experience of empathy connecting the creative person with the work produced, while dissociation separates the trance state from waking consciousness. Empathy can enhance sports performance by intuiting the moves of an opponent. Stanislavski’s system of empathic acting revolutionized film and theater, and in science, Alexander Graham Bell felt he became one with his machines. Some empathic people view creativity as their children; Charles Dickens called David Copperfield his “favorite child.” Dissociative inspiration can seem to originate from a Muse or divine source; Giacomo Puccini believed his opera Madame Butterfly “was dictated to me by God.” Cross culturally, dissociation in ritual trance possession where dancers assume the identity of deities, may bring numinous experiences for both performers and audiences.

Grotius recast Aristotelian theories of human sociability in terms of self-preservation.Religious war in Europe had undermined the Thomist notion of mutual human affection as a basis for society.If society was established by the need to survive, then justice, which maintained society, must be understood in terms of its contribution to that necessity.Grotius therefore resolved the Ancient Roman and Greek problem of how to reconcile justice and expedience by reinterpreting justice in terms of expedience.For an individual, or state, to act out of self-preservation was necessarily just.His fusion of justice and expedience was one reason he was insistent upon distancing his thought from the Academic Sceptics, such as Carneades, who argued that there was no such thing as justice and that all moral action was expedient.For Grotius, part of the law of self-preservation was the necessity for individuals to secure the means for self-preservation and this meant that the acquisition of property, and trade, were central parts of that process.These principles applied also to the artificial person of the state which found itself in competition for survival with other states.The expansion of the state was therefore justifiable for its preservation.Indeed, following this reasoning, empire effectively became a necessity, and an inevitability, for the survival of European states.

In the twenty-first century, Gothic pervades national literatures and cinemas even in some possibly unexpected parts of the world, such as the Islamic Middle East. Gothic texts and films from the region mainly aim to disentangle the genre from Western influence by including motifs from Islamic folklore and demonology such as the supernatural creatures known as ‘djinns’. While many Gothic texts from Islamic countries, such as Iran, are celebrated by Western audiences today for being politically progressive in outlook, a large number of Gothic texts and films from Turkey often tend to cultivate far more conservative values in correlation with governing political and religious orthodoxies. This chapter investigates the cultural origins of what might be called ‘Islamic Gothic’, highlighting its most common conventions concerning the representation of women haunted by malevolent djinns of Islamic cultures. Following a historical survey that sheds light on the development and popularity of Gothic in the Islamic Middle East, particularly in Egypt, Iran and Turkey, the chapter explores the role of the djinn, the mainstream monster of Islamic Gothic in Turkish literature and film, in establishing an ideological position that correlates with the rising popularity of conservative politics in the post millennium.

Chapter One features two girls on the verge of pubertal change: Shakespeare’s almost fourteen-year-old Juliet Capulet, and fourteen-year-old Mary Glover, a London girl who shot to fame after becoming allegedly bewitched by her neighbor. Both Mary and Juliet’s pubescent body-minds play in the gray area between pathology and performance, provoking epistemological dilemmas in their audiences. The chapter first argues that by marking Juliet so clearly in relation to the change of fourteen years, and tracking the fast-paced development of her brainwork, Shakespeare capitalized on his audiences’ fascination with this stage of dynamic female cognition. Juliet’s quick brainwork is largely illegible to her loved ones, but it also undergirds and powers the play’s narrative and moral trajectories. Next, the chapter considers how Glover’s menarche is a central point around which her chroniclers construct their conflicting arguments about her possession — a spectacular event that aggravated some of the most contentious religious and scientific debates of her day. All of the men who witnessed and wrote about Glover’s extraordinary physical and verbal acts grapple with the possibility that she could be willing her body-mind contortions, which were variously explained as a teenage girl’s performance, a scam, divine channeling, demonic possession, and authentic illness.

Moving from the specificities of the manuscript itself to the conditions of reading and recitation, this chapter looks at when and how the Gospel lectionary was used in the Divine Liturgy, while also investigating the cultural role and conception that the practice of reading held in the post-iconoclastic Byzantine world. This presents us with a survey of not only liturgical practices, but also how reading was understood as being a process of divine inspiration, akin to being possessed, which allowed the speakers in the text to be embodied through the reader. The chapter surveys not only the classical heritage of these ideas, but also contemporaneous descriptions of chanters and recitation competitions held in Constantinople, which allow us to understand the cultural importance and milieu under which these illuminated Gospel lectionaries were produced and used.