Against the ‘Current’

On a train from Calcutta (Howrah) to Allahabad, a tall, lanky European with blue eyes and an auburn beard, clad in the white robe of a Christian priest, sat, immersed in a book. In India, during the 1960s and 1970s, the train-running schedule had enough stoppages at major stations to allow a thorough inspection and recharge–refuel of the engines. At the Asansol station, the train took that extra halt; the European priest put his book down and got off the train to stretch his long limbs. Upon his return to the seat, he found the gentleman sitting next to him reading his book; his fellow passenger wore an expression of sheer amazement as he flipped through the pages. Seeing that the book's owner was back, the gentleman hurriedly put the book back and blurted, ‘I did not know that you knew Hindi’ (Ponette 1987, p. 69). The European priest nodded his head in affirmation, and the two started talking; it soon became apparent that the foreigner-looking clergyman was exceptionally proficient in Hindi. The two talked non-stop for several hours until the train reached Allahabad. As the tall priest prepared to leave the train, his fellow passenger said, ‘What a loss for me; I missed the chance to converse with you in Hindi for the first three hours of our journey between Calcutta and Asansol’ (ibid.). As the two passengers bid adieu, the one on the platform started walking towards the exit door of the Allahabad railway station. He was Reverend Father Camille Bulcke, also known as Baba Bulcke by then.

Camille’s appearance, dress and demeanour all marked him as a foreigner, yet his sense of belonging to India held great significance for him throughout his life. He spent most of his life in Ranchi, Jharkhand (erstwhile Bihar), where he taught Hindi and Sanskrit at St Xavier's College. Manresa House, the residential compound of the Jesuits in Ranchi, proudly displays his statue in his white priestly robe. In more recent times, St Xavier's College has installed a bust of the legendary Christian priest on its premises, with his favourite words from the Ramcharitmanas (Divine Lake of Ram's Deeds) inscribed underneath.

Based on all the specifics teased out in Chapter 15, this chapter takes a wide view. While the narrative arc focuses on the general contours of the biblical account and the chapter retells the narrative of the United Monarchy from beginning to end, it is the archaeological and historical reality that is the driving explanatory force. Thus many aspects of the biblical account (especially those that relate to the relationship between Saul and David) are presented very differently than the traditional model, as we retell the biblical story as we think it really happened.

Of the numerous scholars of Hindi among the British administrators and European missionaries who came to India over the last two hundred years – most notably John Gilchrist, George Grierson, F. W. Keay and Edwin Greaves – and lately among the post-colonial ‘South Asianists’, only Camille Bulcke seems to have the distinction of becoming a household name in the extensive Hindi-speaking areas of the country.

That is because one can find in countless Hindi homes a copy of his Angreji–Hindi Kosh (English–Hindi Dictionary), first published in 1968, in its third revised edition by 1981, and reprinted altogether 19 times already by 1991 when I belatedly acquired my copy. As Bulcke explained in his preface, he intended it for the use of those who already had English but wished to learn Hindi (like himself) and hoped that it might prove useful ‘also to those whose mother tongue is Hindi, especially those engaged in translation work’ (like myself). But he also added a third category of people to whom this work might be of help: ‘Indian students who wish to improve their knowledge of English’. One may suspect that it is this last category which has benefitted the most from Bulcke's triple-function dictionary, for it nicely supplements or even supersedes the usual English–English dictionaries, where the explanation given is, for many early learners, nearly as challenging as the words they look up.

Bulcke also provided the correct pronunciation of each word in the Devanagari script, which is incomparably more phonetic than the Roman script. Moreover, he cut out the frills which needlessly complicate the life of a language learner. For example, the title of his work has for its first word not the English word ‘English’ but the Hindi word ‘Angreji’, which is here spelt not as ‘Angrezi’ with a z but as ‘Angreji’ with a j, the common pronunciation of the word without the non-native sound z. Bulcke had obviously learnt his Hindi well enough to know what is indigenous to it and what is not (Bulcke 1968, vii).

Good knowledge of immunophenotypic features of normal cells in various compartments is important when potentially pathological specimen are sent for examination in the flow cytometry platform. This chapter proposes a comprehensive description of these features, together with some functional and/or maturation characteristics of some cell types. Blood and bone marrow are considered, but also body fluids and, briefly, some tissues.

Edward Said (1978) introduced the notion of imaginative geography: Groups with a hunger for land essentially reimagine the landscapes they desire, elevating the notion of themselves as the owners of the land they seek, a process of reinventing the meaning of territorial landscapes as ‘imagined geography’. This would help them frame arguments justifying why they are entitled to take possession of the landscapes they desire. Before the actors themselves see and conquer the land, they entertain themselves under a discursive understanding that they are the owners of the landscapes that they covet. Hence, this imaginative geography is a theory of human action deriving from the interplay of material impulses and human consciousness (Gregory 1999); it is ‘performative’. Reimagining landscapes is the first step to acting upon them and creating the very outcomes on the land being imagined (Gregory 2004: 17–20). In this process, hegemonic forces with territorial ambitions refashion themselves as owners of the territory they desire by asserting themselves as masters and sovereign of the land.

Here, one wonders, what is the landscape that has emerged as part of the subaltern project of the imagined geographies? This entails the counterimagination and a contra-discourse of the imaginative geographies by the oppressed, intertwined with the notion of egalitarianism and justice, which could be realized through ecospatial struggles. If this imagined landscape and the struggle for the same is for livelihood and basic human and ‘post-human’ survival, the struggling poor would be forced to follow the logic of their own ‘moral economy’ that historically protected their rights to subsistence (Thompson 1991). The large number of ‘land-wars’ (Levien 2013) that have been taking place in Latin America and Asia, particularly in India, offers how the subalterns imagine their struggles as part of their livelihood and citizenship rights. If it was Muthanga in Kerala in 2003, it was Chengara in 2007. If Muthanga was occupied by the Adivasis, it was the Dalits – formerly the agrestic slaves and the most marginalized of all the outcastes of the Hindus – that occupied the Chengara part of the colonially evolved Harrisons Malayalam plantations. Even after three and a half decades of land reform experimentation how does one explain the Dalit land struggles in Kerala? Can Chengara replace Occupy Muthanga in terms of strategies, struggles, and outcomes? How far did the state succeed or fail in addressing the Dalit land question, their resource endowments, and livelihood?

This chapter defines the field of history by examining both the topics it investigates and some of its long-standing and unique epistemological and methodological assumptions. It points out the unique breadth of the discipline, which has always taken the whole of human experience as its object of study. It emphasizes the holism of the discipline – that is, History’s consistent interest not in particular parts or aspects of that experience, but in the interactions between different aspects of human societies. It examines the historicist tradition within the discipline – the fundamental assumption that every aspect of human life is conditioned by its broad historical context. And it explores the way in which that fundamental assumption has contributed to a primarily idiographic epistemological position – an interest in the analysis of the particular and specific, rather than the general or universal.

This chapter focuses on the "alternate endings" typology. Building on theories of political rhetoric, we can break norms down into norm frames (norm-based justifications) and behavioral claims (conclusions for actions) and identify four alternate endings of norm contestation: norm impasse, norm neglect, norm recognition and norm clarification. Whether states (dis)agree on frames, claims, or both affects the stability of these alternate endings and norm strength. As identifying frames and claims in actors’ interpretations of international law is the cornerstone of this book, this chapter first provides detailed guidance on different kinds of norm frame and claim disagreements. It then analyzes the relative stability of each "alternate ending" and shows that frame agreement is an internal source of stability. Norm strength is conceptualized as the extent of collective expectations related to applying a norm of international law in a certain way. Norms are stronger when these collective expectations are clearer (social norm strength), and are held by more (critical) actors and/or cover more situations (relative norm strength). The chapter shows that the "alternate endings" typology can anchor the assessment of how contestation affects collective expectations. This approach provides a more actor-centric assessment of norm strength, compared to other prominent approaches.

Is the biblical story about Israel’s “United Monarchy” history, fiction, or somewhere in between? This chapter reviews the scholarly discourse about the texts and introduces critical Bible study. Since the inception of critical scholarship, Bible scholars have noted that the narrative contains tensions and even contradictions that demonstrate the impossibility of accepting the details of the biblical narrative as an accurate reporting of events. Nevertheless, researchers long distinguished between the core narrative arc of the Saul and David stories, which was relatively consistent between the sources, and the many contradictions, alternative details, and smaller points, which were understood as attempts at polemic and apologetics, pushing one agenda or another, or simply rhetorical flourish. This meant that while many of the details in these accounts cannot be taken at face value as historical, the same critical reading of the text led biblical scholars to believe – until recently – in the historicity of the bigger picture. The reasons why this consensus has changed are primarily due to broader, “archaeological” considerations that are discussed in Chapter 3.

We have proposed in these pages to consider sacrificial violence as a singularity – in other words, as an object that eludes analysis and that can only be approached through examining the set of relations that are tied up in it.

We have seen how violence, in its exemplary form of sacrifice and in its generalised form of the ‘great sacrifice’ of war, is intertwined with social organisation. The latter is born of sacrifice in the myth of the first sacrifice. Reciprocally, for the royal sacrifice, each group assumes the function proper to its class, as created by this mythical account of the first sacrifice. This circular movement expresses a tautological ideology that posits sacrifice as the essence of organised life and, in return, sacralises its sacrificial reordering.

Through the consecration of the violence it operates within, sacrifice presents itself as a model of legitimate violence. This violence is openly exhibited and may be denied as violence or else declared necessary. This does not mean, however, that sacrifice represents a lesser violence aimed at containing generalised violence. On the contrary, it is magnified and propagated during the buffalo sacrifice. Nor does its legitimacy make it a violence that is not perceived as such, at least by some categories of people in the assembly. In the royal ceremony, at the same time as the sacrifice directs violence outside of the group, in the execution of the animal alter and then in the war which follows it, it also exerts violence within it, through a whole range of procedures that we have encountered throughout this text, such as by exclusion, victimisation or threat targeted at specific categories of people within the group. Sacrificial violence thus takes on a dual manifestation within the group from which it emanates – at once unifying and divisive, inclusive and exclusive, it is exerted upon the community, carving out its partitions only to unfold outside of them. It thus expresses social violence and political violence in the same movement, each containing the idiom of the other at its heart, recalling the sacrifice in ancient India, in which each constituent part contained the whole. In this manner, both social structure and political activity inter-construct each other through violence, which is itself conditioned by the form that sacrifice gives it.

The milestones of the anthropological approach to sacrifice have drawn a dead-end trajectory. Initially inspired by a desire to construct a unique and universal model of sacrifice through the identification of its scheme, to which Hubert and Mauss attached themselves, within a matter of decades the idea that the infinite variation of sacrifice eluded any attempts to conclusively define it imposed itself. It even led to the term ‘sacrifice’ being denounced entirely, on the grounds that it would artificially unify an enormous diversity of practices across the globe, as well as being too connected to a Christian heritage. Such a definitive denunciation of sacrifice was formulated by Marcel Detienne (1979: 34–35):

A few decades later, it appears that, unlike the notion of totemism, which effectively fell into disuse after its deconstruction by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962), sacrifice is far from weakened by these remarks, nor has it even ceased to be used as a category of analysis by its author and those working in the field. Briefly put, the political history of the last three decades in particular has dramatically reintroduced sacrifice to modern anthropological thought.

As Ivan Strenski (2003) points out, the science of religions was initially uninterested in sacrifice, which was seen as an amoral and primitive practice. Following the first works of the English school, an essay on sacrifice by Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss appeared in 1899, when its two authors were both 27 years old. The former was a history graduate, the second a philosophy graduate, and both shared a passion for ancient languages, notably Hebrew and Sanskrit, as well as for religious trivia.

Measurable residual disease (MRD) is an established prognostic factor after induction chemotherapy in acute myeloid leukaemia patients. Over the past decades, molecular and flow cytometry-based assays have been optimized to provide highly specific and sensitive MRD assessment that is clinically validated. Flow cytometry is an accessible technique available in most clinical diagnostic laboratories worldwide and has the advantage of being applicable in approximately 90% of patients. Here, the essential aspects of flow cytometry-based MRD assessment are discussed, focusing on the identification of leukaemic cells using leukaemia associated immunophenotypes. Analysis, detection limits of the assay, reporting of results and current clinical applications are also reviewed. Additionally, limitations of the assay will be discussed, including the future perspective of flow cytometry-based MRD assessment.