"Your Mindful Compass" takes us behind the emotional curtain to see the mechanisms regulating individuals in social systems. There is great comfort and wisdom in knowing we can increase our awareness to manage the swift and ancient mechanisms of social control. We can gain greater flexibility by seeing how social controls work in systems from ants to humans. To be less controlled by others, we learn how emotional systems influence our relationship-oriented brain. People want to know what goes on in families that give rise to amazing leaders and/or terrorists. For the first time in history we can understand the systems in which we live. The social sciences have been accumulating knowledge since the early fifties as to how we are regulated by others. S. Milgram, S. Ashe, P. Zimbardo and J. Calhoun, detail the vulnerability to being duped and deceived and the difficulty of cooperating when values differ. Murray Bowen, M.D., the first researcher to observe several live-in families, for up to three years, at the National Institute of Mental Health. Describing how family members overly influence one another and distribute stress unevenly, Bowen described both how symptoms and family leaders emerge in highly stressed families. Our brain is not organized to automatically perceive that each family has an emotional system, fine-tuned by evolution and "valuing" its survival as a whole, as much as the survival of any individual. It is easier to see this emotional system function in ants or mice but not in humans. The emotional system is organized to snooker us humans: encouraging us to take sides, run away from others, to pressure others, to get sick, to blame others, and to have great difficulty in seeing our part in problems. It is hard to see that we become anxious, stressed out and even that we are difficult to deal with. But "thinking systems" can open the doors of perception, allowing us to experience the world in a different way. This book offers both coaching ideas and stories from leaders as to strategies to break out from social control by de-triangling, using paradoxes, reversals and other types of interruptions of highly linked emotional processes. Time is needed to think clearly about the automatic nature of the two against one triangle. Time and experience is required as we learn strategies to put two people together and get self outside the control of the system. In addition, it takes time to clarify and define one's principles, to know what "I" will or will not do and to be able to take a stand with others with whom we are very involved. The good news is that systems' thinking is possible for anyone. It is always possible for an individual to understand feelings and to integrate them with their more rational brains. In so doing, an individual increases his or her ability to communicate despite misunderstandings or even rejection from important others. The effort involved in creating your Mindful Compass enables us to perceive the relationship system without experiencing it's threats. The four points on the Mindful Compass are: 1) Action for Self, 2) Resistance to Forward Progress, 3) Knowledge of Social Systems and the 4) The Ability to Stand Alone. Each gives us a view of the process one enters when making an effort to define a self and build an emotional backbone. It is not easy to find our way through the social jungle. The ability to know emotional systems well enough to take a position for self and to become more differentiated is part of the natural way humans cope with pressure. Now people can use available knowledge to build an emotional backbone, by thoughtfully altering their part in the relationship system. No one knows how far one can go by making an effort to be more of a self-defined individual in relationships to others. Through increasing emotional maturity, we can find greater individual freedom at the same time that we increase our ability to cooperate and to be close to others.

While working in Africa, anthropologist Julien Bonhomme encountered an astonishing phenomenon: people being accused of stealing or shrinking the genitals of strangers on the simple occasion of a handshake on the street. As he soon discovered, these accusations can have dramatic outcomes: the "sex thieves" are often targeted by large crowds and publicly lynched. Moreover, such rumors are an extremely widespread practice, having affected almost half of the African continent since the 1970s. In this book, Bonhomme examines the story of the "penis snatcher," asking larger questions about how to account for such a phenomenon--unique in its spatial and temporal scale--without falling prey to the cliché of Africa as an exotic other. Bonhomme argues that the public belief in sex thieves cannot be considered a superstition or form of mass hysteria. Rather, he brings to light multiple factors that explain the rumor's success and shows how the cultural dynamic can operate on a vast scale. Analyzing the rumor on both transnational and local levels, he demonstrates how it arises from the ambiguities and dangers of anonymity, and thus that it reveals an occult flipside to everyday social interaction. Altogether, this book provides both richly ethnographic and theoretical understandings of urban sociality and the dynamics of human communication in contemporary Africa and beyond.

Perhaps the only postwar classical composer to invest avant-garde music with overt eroticism, Luc Ferrari (1929-2005) was one of France's leading composers of the twentieth century, relentlessly experimental while always preserving his keen sense of humor. Ferrari was a first-generation exponent of musique concrète, and made brilliant use of field recordings to develop sensual, proto-ambient narrative that he termed "anecdotal music" or "cinema for the ear." Perhaps the most notorious instance of this approach was Danses Organiques (1973), for which Ferrari recorded the meeting and sexual encounter of two young women, cut with other ambient and music sound. In his final decades Ferrari was championed by David Grubbs (of Gastr del Sol), who brought his music to a postrock audience. Almost Nothing is the first publication on this composer. It alternates Jacqueline Caux's interviews with 14 "imaginary autobiographies" by the composer, offering a lively account of new music's most revolutionary era.

This book, written by the celebrated nineteenth century French economist propagating free trade, reads as it was written yesterday.