Returning to the Iberian Peninsula, this chapter considers how colonial experiences influenced early modern views of horse breeding. King Philip II’s survey of horse breeding in Spain and his efforts to develop a new royal “race” (raza) of horses provide two valuable case studies of contemporary debates about improving horse breeds. Knowledge and expertise gained from active horse breeding often contradicted ideal values of lineage or blood purity. These cases acknowledge limits to the control implied in selectively breeding domesticated animals and demonstrate an early modern understanding of the contructedness of horse breeds. In a larger sense, these findings offer a nuanced reading of how raza and casta in animal husbandry relate to histories of racial terminology and classifications of difference in the Spanish empire.

This chapter shows the limits of political Manichaeism with reference to the career of Maximilien Robespierre and his fellow Jacobin leaders during the French Revolution. It criticizes the use of litmus tests and the search for purity in political life, it also engages with the rhetoric of key members of the Claremont Institute whose radical agenda shows disturbing similarities with that of the Jacobins.

Presents the basic postulates of quantum mechanics in terms of the density matrix instead of the usual state vector formalism in the case of an isolated system. Extends it to the case of open systems with the help of the reduced density matrix formalism, and to the case of an imperfect state preparation described by a statistical mixture. Introduces the concept of quantum state purity to characterize the degree of mixture of the state, and shows that one can always "purify" a density matrix by going into a Hilbert space of larger dimension.

Socrates here draws on the cyclical and kinship arguments to further explain nearly every claim made earlier in the defense speech (Chapter 3). He provides an interconnected account of virtue, happiness, moral psychology, reincarnation, and soul–body interaction. He first describes how coming to know the divine will ultimately allow the philosopher’s soul to spend the afterlife with the gods, eternally happy. By contrast, non-philosophers reincarnate because their desire for the body-like pulls them into a new body after death. Understanding this mechanism requires clarifying how Socrates thinks of the impurities in non-philosophers’ souls. After examining this, the chapter turns to how the body deceives the soul into desiring things that are not good for it. Socrates develops the account of true courage and temperance from the exchange passage (69a–e) to explain how the philosopher avoids and resists the body’s insidious effects so that the soul can pursue wisdom and so be eternally happy.

Here I argue that, inasmuch as antisemitism has a theological or ideological dimension, it manifests itself in three fundamental ways: the appropriation of the Word, the accusation and spilling of blood, and the determination of redemption. Always originating with highly sophisticated thinkers, antisemitism requires the appropriation or removal of the Holy Word in order to have the final word on the value of the human being and the higher relation that defines our humanity. In religious traditions this shows up as an appropriation of sacred texts; in the secular world we see it in texts like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Similarly, the antisemite demands purity, a demand manifest in blood libel, blood purification, and bloodletting: For the antisemite, sanctity means purity, and purity requires the elimination of the contagion, which is the Jew and the Judaism, and the contagion is in his or her blood. Finally, the antisemite must be the guardian of the gate to redemption, whether it lies in the salvation of the soul or in a utopian totalitarianism.

In this chapter, we explore the concept of purity and the processes of purification in their archaeological as well as broader national expressions. The discussion touches on aesthetic and religious conceptions of a pure, sacralized past, on the removal of living people from archaeological landscapes, and on the modernist separation of past from present, science from culture, and of the rational from the affective.

This chapter first examines a variety of approaches, including that of Frantz Fanon, to exploring violence and race in a colonial context. Rejecting binary approaches, like that of Fanon, this examines the political use and cultural understanding of the concepts like "race" and "ethnicity." Rather than see race in terms of a simple imperial deployment of racist practices and beliefs against the colonized, this chapter also argues for an "appropriation" model of ideas and practices of race and ethnicity to help explain the complexity of race-talk and race practices involving France, the Vietnamese, the Khmer, Africans, and Chinese. The chapter looks at France’s initial concern with white prestige in choosing the soldiers to fight on the side of France before turning to the Vietnamese. It examines pre-existing Vietnamese understandings of race, as articulated in Vietnamese, and their combination with Western discourses of race and racial hierarchies. The chapter digs into particularly troubling texts on race, racial extinction, and cannibalism, and the implication of such texts for understanding the war as a whole. Looks at arguments over purity, hybridity, and race.

In Reconquista Spain, a barely united state turned its anxieties inward with anti-Semitic laws on blood purity among converts from Judaism and Islam. The same insecure state turned outward to conquer Mexico, where Franciscans spent fifty years recording Aztec human sacrifice in codices and color drawings. Castilians and Aztecs alike marked their external bounds and internal bonds with blood. Ethnicizing ideas of blood purity crossed the Atlantic to ruddy Christian perceptions of Mesoamerican sacrifice. Two blood-obsessed cultures met to reveal disturbing resonances in Christian blood language. Uses Sircoff on limpieza de sangre and Timothy Radcliffe on cultic irony in Hebrews.

This chapter focuses on the Partition of India along religious lines, and on the shifting of the emotional locus of belonging from where one actually lives to Pakistan, which is seen as simultaneously hostile and territory that one is not prepared to surrender. The author reflects on the continuation of the Partition rhetoric through the aggressive and criminal sundering of couples who marry across community barriers.

Mendelian thinking led to the refashioning of concepts with larger social, political and cultural implications. Mendelian theory offered a new way for thinking about the meaning of national purity and (racial) hybridity – or, as the Germans preferred to call it, “bastardization.” It also suggested a new concept that quickly became a focal point for scientific, medical and social anxieties: recessive traits. The new toolbox which Mendelism offered impinged directly on the emerging visions for racial regeneration, which became attractive for fascist thinkers propagating the rebirth of the nation. Furthermore, Mendelian teaching became part of the discussions on the pathological nature of Jews, on the one hand, and of the cultural exaltation of the peasanthood as the fountain of racial renewal, on the other hand. Whereas the recessive nature of Jewish traits could account for the negative evaluation of the Jews, the recessive nature of blindness aided in boosting up the amount of Nordic blood among peasants. Thus, national ideology became saturated with Mendelian terms and concepts.

Celibacy is a strong theme in the earliest papal legislation and it is connected with both kinds of hierarchy. The connection with status hierarchy is strongest as celibacy marked off the deacons, priests, and bishops from lower levels of clerical status, but the ‘celibacy line’ is also linked to command hierarchy, as deacons, the first level of hierarchy of which celibacy was required, were key figures in the government of episcopal churches, notably at Rome, where they were more powerful than priests. The clerical celibacy of late Antiquity is a different sort from that of the eleventh-century Gregorian Reform. In the second half of the fourth century the Roman Church began to enforce the rule that clerics should give up sex if they wanted to be promoted to deacon, though they would not separate from their wives (below which there were a series of levels where clerics could be sexually active with their wives). This celibacy rule may have arisen to help the ordinary clergy keep up with monastic asceticism, but its rationale and function was to mark out the separateness of those who came closest to the Eucharist.

Lucy Tunstall provides readers with a crucial understanding of Plath’s conception of the lyric. Tunstall brings alive Plath’s continuous, deliberate interventions in the lyric mode’s possibilities and limits. She situates Plath’s development of the lyric in the poet’s childhood and College influences and traces it through to the Ariel poems and their seemingly incompatible registers. Tunstall shows us not just the unsurprising engagement with sound and voice, but with the visual, too, in Plath’s unique conceptions of the lyric. Finally, Tunstall confronts the difficult questions raised by Plath’s treatment of race in the context of her obsessive exploration of ideas of purity.