North America faces a transportation crisis. Gas-guzzling SUVs clog the highways and air travelers face delays, cancellations, and uncertainty in the wake of unprecedented terrorist attacks. New Departures closely examines the options for improving intercity passenger trains’ capacity to move North Americans where they want to go. While Amtrak and VIA Rail Canada face intense pressure to transform themselves into successful commercial enterprises, Anthony Perl demonstrates how public policy changes lie behind the triumphs of European and Japanese high-speed rail passenger innovations. Perl goes beyond merely describing these achievements, translating their implications into a North American institutional and political context and diagnosing the obstacles that have made renewing passenger trains so much more difficult in North America than elsewhere. New Departures links the lessons behind rail passenger revitalization abroad with the opportunity to recast the policies that constrain Amtrak and VIA Rail from providing efficient and effective intercity transportation.

This third volume in the World Society Studies series focuses on a central theme: how market mechanisms can correct the world welfare deficit and also resolve the environmental crisis through processes of sustainable development. The two editors trace how such objectives have been addressed since the 1960s, and describe the parameters of the debate. Conflicts and New Departures in World Society contains original research on confluences and fissures in emerging world society, in both international and domestic arenas.The sixteen contributors offer an unusually wide range of perspectives. Topics include peace and war, core-periphery situations, and social and labor conflicts. Marek Thee traces the quest for a demilitarized and nuclear-free world. Johan Kauf-mann analyzes the role of the United Nations in the post-cold war era. Jill Crystal concentrates on the human rights environment in the Arab World. H.C.F. Mansilla comments on the destruction of the tropical forests in Bolivia. Other contributors include Bruce Russett, Christian Suter, John Foran, Beverly Silver, and Georg Kohler.Conflicts and New Departures in World Society gives intellectual substance to the still nebulous notion of a world society. It does so not by advocacy, but by indicating parallel social, economic, and political conditions that compel new interactions between advanced and developing lands. This books will be of interest to sociologists, environmentalists, and political theorists and scientists.

Anticipation -- Expectation -- Speculation -- Potentiality -- Hope -- Destiny.

A broad, fresh perspective on how genetic research redefines what it means to be human.

Through an ambitious and critical revision of Michel Foucault's investigation of ethics, James Faubion develops an original program of empirical inquiry into the ethical domain. From an anthropological perspective, Faubion argues that Foucault's specification of the analytical parameters of this domain is the most productive point of departure in conceptualizing its distinctive features. He further argues that Foucault's framework is in need of substantial revision to be of genuinely anthropological scope. In making this revision, Faubion illustrates his program with two extended case studies: one of a Portuguese marquis and the other of a dual subject made up of the author and a millenarian prophetess. The result is a conceptual apparatus that is able to accommodate ethical pluralism and yield an account of the limits of ethical variation, providing a novel resolution of the problem of relativism that has haunted anthropological inquiry into ethics since its inception.

What can texts - both written and oral - tell us about the societies that produce them? How are texts constituted in different cultures, and how do they shape societies and individuals? How can we understand the people who compose them? Drawing on examples from Africa and other countries, this original study sets out to answer these questions, by exploring textuality from a variety of angles. Topics covered include the importance of genre, the ways in which oral genres transcend the here-and-now, and the complex relationship between texts and the material world. Barber considers the ways in which personhood is evoked, both in oral poetry and in written diaries and letters, discusses the audience's role in creating the meaning of texts, and shows textual creativity to be a universal human capacity expressed in myriad forms. Engaging and thought-provoking, this book will be welcomed by anyone interested in anthropology, literature and cultural studies.