In 1952, Professor Allan Holmberg arranged for Cornell University to lease the Hacienda Vicos, an agricultural estate in the central Peruvian highlands on which some 1800 Quechua-speaking highland peasants resided. Between 1952 and 1957 Holmberg, with colleagues and students, initiated a set of social, economic, and agrarian changes, and nurtured mechanisms for community-based management of the estate by the resident peasants. By the end of a second lease in 1962, sufficient political pressure had been brought to bear on a reluctant national government to force the sale of Vicos to its people. Holmberg's twin goals for the Vicos Project were to bring about community possession of their land base and to study the process as it unfolded, advancing anthropological understanding of cultural change. To describe the process of doing both, he invented the term 'participant intervention.' Despite the large corpus of existing Vicos publications, this book contains much information that here reaches print for the first time. The chapter authors do not entirely agree on various key points regarding the nature of the Vicos Project, the intentions of project personnel and community actors, and what interpretive framework is most valid; in part, these disagreements reflect the relevance and importance of the Vicos Project to contemporary applied anthropologists and the contrasting ways in which any historical event can be explained. Some chapters contrast Vicos with other projects in the southern Andean highlands; others examine new developments at Vicos itself. The conclusion suggests how those changes should be understood, within Andean anthropology and within anthropology more generally.

Jürgen Trabant reads the profound insights into human semiosis contained in Vico's 'sematology' as both a spirited rejection of Cartesian philosophy and an early critique of enlightened logocentricism. Sean Ward's translation makes this work available to an English-reading audience for the first time.

The essays within Beyond Catholicism trace the interconnections of belief, heresy, and mysticism in Italian culture from the Middle Ages to today. In particular, they explore how religious discourse has unfolded within Italian culture in the context of shifting paradigms of rationality, authority, time, good and evil, and human collectivities.

This collection of essays explores the reception of classics and translation from modern languages as two different, yet synergic, ways of engaging with literary canons and established traditions in 20th-century Italy. These two areas complement each other and equally contribute to shape several kinds of identities: authorial, literary, national and cultural. Foregrounding the transnational aspects of key concepts such as poetics, literary voice, canon and tradition, the book is intended for scholars and students of Italian literature and culture, classical reception and translation studies. With its two shifting focuses, on forms of classical tradition and forms of literary translation, the volume brings to the fore new configurations of 20th-century literature, culture and thought.

Beyond Secular Order is the first of a two-volume work that expands upon renowned theologian John Milbank’s innovative attempt to understand both theology and modern thought begun in his previously published classic text Theology and Social Theory. Continues Milbank’s innovative attempt to understand both theology and modern thought begun in Theology and Social Theory – considered a classic work in the development of systematic theology Authored by one of the world’s most influential and highly regarded contemporary theologians Draws on a sweep of ideas and thinkers to argue that modern secularism is a form of Christian heresy that developed from the Middle Ages and can only be overcome by a renewed account of Christendom Shows how this heresy can be transformed into a richer blend of religion, modernity and politics Reveals how there is a fundamental homology between modern ideas about ontology and knowledge and modern ideas about political action, expressed in both theory and practice

This book introduces the thought of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) into the discussion about natural law. For many critics, natural law is not natural but a façade behind which lurks the supernatural – that is, revealed religion. While current notions of natural law are based on either Aristotelian/Thomistic principles or on Enlightenment rationalism, the book shows how Vico was the only natural law thinker to draw on the Roman legal tradition, rather than on Greek or Enlightenment philosophy. Specifically, the book addresses how Vico, drawing his inspiration from Roman history, incorporated both rhetoric and religion into a dynamic concept of natural law grounded in what he called the sensus communis: the entire repertoire of values, images, institutions, and even prejudices that a community takes for granted. Vico denied that natural law could ever furnish a definitive answer to moral problems in the social/public sphere. Rather he maintained that such problems had to be debated in the wider arena of the sensus communis. For Vico, as this book argues, natural law principles emerged from these debates; they did not resolve them.

Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) was an Italian philosopher, rhetorician, and historian. As one of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, he exerted tremendous influence on the social sciences. He was the first to stress cultural and linguistic dimensions in the development of both the human mind and social institutions. Although his ideas on the relationship between mind and culture and his epistemology have inspired the work of many scholars in psychology, his sizeable influence has been scarcely acknowledged. The volume is organized in two sections. The first locates Vico in his historical context and in the landscape of contemporary human and social sciences. The second part presents those of Vico’s concepts that seem promising for the development of a new way of looking at psychological phenomena. In the book’s conclusion, Luca Tateo gathers the ideas of the volume’s contributors to suggest future development of the psychological sciences. This book aims to show how Vico’s insights can inspire future research in the psychological sciences. It collects multidisciplinary contributions of leading international scholars that draw upon the thought of this original thinker. Collectively, the contributors remind us of the legacy and continuing influence of this inspiring historical figure.