The Antikythera Mechanism, now 82 small fragments of corroded bronze, was an ancient Greek machine simulating the cosmos as the Greeks understood it. Reflecting the most recent researches, A Portable Cosmos presents it as a gateway to Greek astronomy and technology and their place in Greco-Roman society and thought.

This volume reveals the historical dynamism of what appears at first sight to be a forgotten backwater.

From our first ABCs to the Book of Revelation’s statement that Jesus is “the Alpha and Omega,” we see the world through our letters. More than just a way of writing, the alphabet is a powerful concept that has shaped Western civilization and our daily lives. In The Letter and the Cosmos, Laurence de Looze probes that influence, showing how the alphabet has served as a lens through which we conceptualize the world and how the world, and sometimes the whole cosmos, has been perceived as a kind of alphabet itself. Beginning with the ancient Greeks, he traces the use of alphabetic letters and their significance from Plato to postmodernism, offering a fascinating tour through Western history. A sharp and entertaining examination of how languages, letterforms, orthography, and writing tools have reflected our hidden obsession with the alphabet, The Letter and the Cosmos is illustrated with copious examples of the visual and linguistic phenomena which de Looze describes. Read it, and you’ll never look at the alphabet the same way again.

The question of Kurdish identity and belonging is counted among the most controversial and challenging topics in modern Turkey. This book cuts to the heart of this debate in an exploration of shifting Kurdish identities brought on by extensive rural-urban labour migration. This has shaped the lives of many rural Turkish Kurds as competing discourses on religiosity, gender relations and social hierarchy redraw the boundaries of traditional life. The focus of this book is migration from Kurdish villages in eastern provincial Turkey to the regional capital of Van and to Istanbul in the west, what started with seasonal migration of young men in the 1980s and has resulted in whole families leaving their emptying villages behind. This pattern of migration has created translocational networks through which discourses are created, maintained and also challenged. Village life, for instance, becomes discursively romanticised or disparaged, depending on the situation of the migrant. These networks come to consist of people who share lineage membership or origin; migrants may activate these links for marriages, favours and political advantage. At the same time, migration has led to more socio-economic differentiation between Kurds, and some have transcended ties based purely on ethnic origin. Increased education, both a motive for and a result of migration, has become an instrument of linguistic assimilation as families lose Kurdish as a language of communication and a marker of ethnic differentiation. 'Traditional' social paradigms characterised by a gender-age hierarchy and religious piety are challenged by and coexist with alternative gender roles and images. The everyday experiences of rural-urban migrants from Van province, on the south-eastern borders of the country, are central to this book, but they are inextricably linked to conflicting discourses on Kurdishness and the place of this minority in Turkey.

When we think of kinship, we usually think of ties between people based upon blood or marriage. But we also have other ways—nowadays called ‘performative’—of establishing kinship, or hinting at kinship: many Christians have, in addition to parents, godparents; members of a trade union may refer to each other as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’. Similar performative ties are even more common among the so-called ‘tribal’ peoples that anthropologists have studied and, especially in recent years, they have received considerable attention from scholars in this field. However, these scholars tend to argue that performative kinship in the Tribal World is semantically on a par with kinship established through procreation and marriage. Harold Scheffler, long-time Professor of Anthropology at Yale University, has argued, by contrast, that procreative ties are everywhere semantically central, i.e. focal, that they provide bases from which other kinship ties are extended. Most of the essays in this volume illustrate the validity of Scheffler’s position, though two contest it, and one exemplifies the soundness of a similarly universalistic stance in gender behaviour. This book will be of interest to everyone concerned with current controversy in kinship and gender studies, as well as those who would know what anthropologists have to say about human nature. “The study of kinship once ruled the discipline of anthropology, and Hal Scheffler was one of its magisterial figures. This volumes reminds us why. Scheffler’s powerful analyses of kinship systems often conflicted with the views of his more relativist contemporaries. He cut through the fog of theory to emphasise the human essentials, namely the importance of the social bonds rooted in motherhood and fatherhood. Anthropology in its decades-long retreat from the serious study of kinship has lost a great deal. This volume points the way to a restoration.” — Peter Wood, National Association of Scholars

Focusing on Southern Europe, this study looks at currently hotly debated issues of kinship, gender and modern medical technologies. It challenges established ideas of cultural continuities and discontinuities within the European context and offers fresh insights into longstanding questions regarding gender and kin relatedness.

This collection explores the social legacy of European Enlightenment ideas of science and rationality. In their deployment science and rationality were intended to give rise to open and democratic societies. The volume addresses the history of these notions while centring on ethnographic studies of openness and equitability in contemporary European social milieux, as well as in the European postcolony and on Europe's increasingly global 'fringes'. The book takes its lead, in particular, from Karl Popper's ideas, and his key liberal text, The Open Society and its Enemies.