Traditionally the "Chinese body" was approached as a totality and explained by sweeping comparisons of the differences that distinguished Chinese examples from their Western counterparts. Recently, scholars have argued that we must look at particular examples of Chinese images of the body and explore their intrinsic conceptual complexity and historical specificity.

The twelve contributors to this volume adopt a middle position. They agree that Chinese images are conditioned by indigenous traditions and dynamics of social interaction, but they seek to explain a general Chinese body and face by charting multiple, specific bodies and faces. All of the chapters are historical case studies and investigate particular images, such as Han dynasty tomb figurines; Buddhist texts and illustrations; pictures of deprivation, illness, deformity, and ghosts; clothing; formal portraiture; and modern photographs and films. From the diversity of art forms and historical periods studied, there emerges a more complex picture of ways that the visual culture of the body and face in China has served to depict the living, memorialize the dead, and present the unrepresentable in art.

Young seventeen-year-old Joelito Filártiga was taken from his family home in Asunción, Paraguay, brutally tortured, and murdered by the Paraguayan police. Breaking Silence is the inside story of the quest for justice by his father—the true target of the police—Paraguayan artist and philanthropist Dr. Joel Filártiga. That cruel death, and the subsequent uncompromising struggle by Joelito's father and family, led to an unprecedented sea change in international law and human rights. The author, Richard Alan White, first became acquainted with the Filártiga family in the mid-1970s while doing research for his dissertation on Paraguayan independence. Answering a distressed letter from Joelito's father, he returned to Paraguay and journeyed with the Filártiga family on their long and difficult road to redress. White gives the reader a compelling first-hand, participant-observer perspective, taking us into the family with him, to give witness to not only their agony and sorrow, but their resolute strength as well—strength that led to a groundbreaking $10 million legal decision in Filártiga v. Peña. (Americo Norberto Peña-Irala was the Paraguayan police officer responsible for Joelito's abduction and murder, whom the Filártigas had arrested after finding him hiding in Brooklyn.)

That landmark decision, based on the almost obscure Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789, ruled that U.S. courts could accept jurisdiction in international cases—recognizing the right of foreign human rights victims to sue—even though the alleged violation occurred in another country by a non-American and against a non-American. So fundamentally has the Filártiga precedent changed the landscape of international human rights law, that it has served as the basis for nearly 100 progeny suits, and grown to encompass not only human rights abuses, but also violations of international environmental and labor rights law. Today, there are dozens of class action suits pending against corporate defendants ranging from oil conglomerates destroying the Amazon rainforest to designer clothing companies running sweatshops abroad.

Breaking Silence is a remarkable, consuming story, documenting not only the most celebrated case in the international human rights field—but also the tragic and touchingly human story behind it that gives it life. In 2001, Dr. Filártiga was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and the Alien Tort Claims Act continues to be hotly debated among politicians and lawmakers.

Charles Le Brun’s drawing manual on human emotions has been used for centuries by artists and students as a model for depicting facial expressions. In David Schutter’s work, Le Brun’s manual is set to a different direction—a series of abstract drawings recalling vestiges of the human face animated by emotion. But Schutter’s drawings are neither copies nor portraiture. Rather, they are reflections on how Lebrun’s renderings were made.

Collected here, Schutter’s work recreates not the subject matter but the very values of Lebrun’s drawings—light, gesture, scale, and handling of materials. The cross-hatching in the original was used to make classical tone and volume, in Schutter’s hand the technique makes for unstable impressions of strained neck and deeply furrowed brow, or for drawing marks and scribbles unto themselves. As such, these drawings end up denying a neat closure—unlike their academic source material—and render unsettling states of mind that require repeated viewing. Accompanied by essays from art critic Barry Schwabsky and Neubauer Collegium curator Dieter Roelstraete, The Escape will appeal to students, critics, and admirers of seventeenth-century, modern, and contemporary art alike.

A multi-scale ethnography of government pedagogy in Colombia and its impact on peace. 

Colombia’s 2016 peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas sought to end fifty years of war and won President Juan Manuel Santos the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet Colombian society rejected it in a polarizing referendum, amid an emotive disinformation campaign. Gwen Burnyeat joined the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace, the government institution responsible for peace negotiations, to observe and participate in an innovative “peace pedagogy” strategy to explain the agreement to Colombian society. Burnyeat’s multi-scale ethnography reveals the challenges government officials experienced communicating with skeptical audiences and translating the peace process for public opinion. She argues that the fatal flaw in the peace process lay in government-society relations, enmeshed in culturally liberal logics and shaped by the politics of international donors. The Face of Peace offers the Colombian case as a mirror to the global crisis of liberalism, shattering the fantasy of rationality that haunts liberal responses to “post-truth” politics.

A first-person look at the challenges and cultural perceptions confronting homeless women. Homeless Mothers follows the lives of mothers on the margins and asks where they fit in the increasingly black-and-white model of motherhood set up by society. Their voices, so rarely heard and so often ignored, resonate throughout this book. Both an anthropologist in the field and a social worker on the job, Deborah R. Connolly is ideally placed to draw out these women's life stories. Using their own words, by turns eloquent and awkward, poignant and harsh, she maps the perilous territory between the promise of childhood and the hard reality of motherhood on the street. What emerges is a glimpse of the cultural, class, gender, and economic challenges these women experience, a glimpse as real for us as the headlines and stereotypes that so often displace homeless mothers and consign them to silence. "Connolly explores in rich detail the day-to-day experiences of women who use family shelters. Homeless Mothers is an insider's view on poverty and homelessness from the standpoint of mothers, families, and the social service providers who work with them. Connolly uses ethnographic methods and skills worthy of a good fiction writer to portray the daily lives, struggles, and intricate negotiations of homeless mothers." --Housing Studies Deborah R. Connolly is an advocate for the homeless and a senior research associate at Edgewood Center for Children and Families in San Francisco. She recently taught cultural anthropology at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

The three essays in Image, written by leading philosophers of religion, explore the modern power of the visual at the intersection of the human and the technological. 

Modern life is steeped in images, image-making, and attempts to control the world through vision. Mastery of images has been advanced by technologies that expand and reshape vision and enable us to create, store, transmit, and display images. The three essays in Image, written by leading philosophers of religion Mark C. Taylor, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, and Thomas A. Carlson, explore the power of the visual at the intersection of the human and the technological. Building on Heidegger’s notion that modern humanity aims to master the world by picturing or representing the real, they investigate the contemporary culture of the image in its philosophical, religious, economic, political, imperial, and military dimensions, challenging the abstraction, anonymity, and dangerous disconnection of contemporary images.

Taylor traces a history of capitalism, focusing on its lack of humility, particularly in the face of mortality, and he considers art as a possible way to reconnect us to the earth. Through a genealogy of iconic views from space, Rubenstein exposes the delusions of conquest associated with extraterrestrial travel. Starting with the pressing issues of surveillance capitalism and facial recognition technology, Carlson extends Heidegger’s analysis through a meditation on the telematic elimination of the individual brought about by totalizing technologies. Together, these essays call for a consideration of how we can act responsibly toward the past in a way that preserves the earth for future generations. Attending to the fragility of material things and to our own mortality, they propose new practices of imagination grounded in love and humility.

In the symbolic world of Christianity, which millions have inhabited for centuries, is there room for modern and postmodern life—for today’s real world of cultural relativism and religious pluralism, of scientific knowledge and historical understanding? In Face of Mystery draws these two worlds together in a full-scale reconception of Christian theology.

Theology, Gordon Kaufman suggests, is an imaginative construction, the creation of a symbolic world for ordering life. As it has been constructed, so it can be reconstructed, and Kaufman does so in a way that clarifies both the historic roots and the present-day applications of Christian symbolism. He works with a “biohistorical” interpretation of human life, one that portrays humanity as a product of biological evolution and historical development. While taking account of cultural and religious pluralism, and while providing criteria for making comparative assessments and judgments, this interpretation of human historical existence also situates human beings—with their capacities for freedom and creativity—within the ecological wed that sustains all life. Human beings, Kaufman argues, have created religious symbolism as a necessary part of their attempt to orient themselves in the world. He shows how Christianity, as a system of symbols, has figured in this effort, and he carefully examines the separate elements of the Christian perspective—foremost among them, God. How does the concept of God, as an ultimate point of reference, enhance our understanding of today’s world; and how does the symbol “Christ” qualify this concept? The answers Kaufman proposes clarify the changing relevance of the symbolic world of Christianity.

Firmly embedded in physical and social science and in the tradition of American pragmatism, this thorough reconception of a Christian worldview offers insight into the most basic questions confronting humanity today—questions of value, meaning, and self-identity.

A study of the role of translation in bringing accounts of difficult circumstances to broader audiences.

In the Face of Adversity explores the dynamics of translating texts that articulate particular notions of adverse circumstances. The contributors show how literary records of painful experiences and dissenting voices are at risk of being stripped of their authenticity when not carefully handled by the translator, how cultural moments in which the translation of a text that would have otherwise fallen into oblivion instead gave rise to a translator who enabled its preservation while ultimately coming into their own as an author as a result, and how the difficulties the translator faces in intercultural or transnational constellations in which prejudice plays a role endangers projects meant to facilitate mutual understanding. The authors address translation as a project of making available and preserving a corpus of texts that would otherwise be in danger of becoming censored, misperceived, or ignored. They look at translation and adaptation as a project of curating textual models of personal, communal, or collective perseverance, and they offer insights into the dynamics of cultural inclusion and exclusion through a series of theoretical frameworks, as well as through a set of concrete case studies drawn from different cultural and historical contexts.
 

Humans possess the most expressive faces in the animal kingdom. Adam Wilkins presents evidence ranging from the fossil record to recent findings of genetics, molecular biology, and developmental biology to reconstruct the fascinating story of how the human face evolved. Beginning with the first vertebrate faces half a billion years ago and continuing to dramatic changes among our recent human ancestors, Making Faces illuminates how the unusual characteristics of the human face came about—both the physical shape of facial features and the critical role facial expression plays in human society.

Offering more than an account of morphological changes over time and space, which rely on findings from paleontology and anthropology, Wilkins also draws on comparative studies of living nonhuman species. He examines the genetic foundations of the remarkable diversity in human faces, and also shows how the evolution of the face was intimately connected to the evolution of the brain. Brain structures capable of recognizing different individuals as well as “reading” and reacting to their facial expressions led to complex social exchanges. Furthermore, the neural and muscular mechanisms that created facial expressions also allowed the development of speech, which is unique to humans.

In demonstrating how the physical evolution of the human face has been inextricably intertwined with our species’ growing social complexity, Wilkins argues that it was both the product and enabler of human sociality.

Shortly before he died, Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Crow Nation, told his story—up to a certain point. “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground,” he said, “and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.” It is precisely this point—that of a people faced with the end of their way of life—that prompts the philosophical and ethical inquiry pursued in Radical Hope. In Jonathan Lear’s view, Plenty Coups’s story raises a profound ethical question that transcends his time and challenges us all: how should one face the possibility that one’s culture might collapse?

This is a vulnerability that affects us all—insofar as we are all inhabitants of a civilization, and civilizations are themselves vulnerable to historical forces. How should we live with this vulnerability? Can we make any sense of facing up to such a challenge courageously? Using the available anthropology and history of the Indian tribes during their confinement to reservations, and drawing on philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, Lear explores the story of the Crow Nation at an impasse as it bears upon these questions—and these questions as they bear upon our own place in the world. His book is a deeply revealing, and deeply moving, philosophical inquiry into a peculiar vulnerability that goes to the heart of the human condition.