BiblioVault - Books about Crisis -

African Futures

Essays on Crisis, Emergence, and Possibility

Edited by Brian Goldstone and Juan Obarrio

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Civil wars, corporate exploitation, AIDS, and Ebola—but also democracy, burgeoning cities, and unprecedented communication and mobility: the future of Africa has never been more uncertain. Indeed, that future is one of the most complex issues in contemporary anthropology, as evidenced by the incredible wealth of ideas offered in this landmark volume. A consortium comprised of some of the most important scholars of Africa today, this book surveys an intellectual landscape of opposed perspectives in order to think within the contradictions that characterize this central question: Where is Africa headed?

The experts in this book address Africa’s future as it is embedded within various social and cultural forms emerging on the continent today: the reconfiguration of the urban, the efflorescence of signs and wonders and gospels of prosperity, the assorted techniques of legality and illegality, lotteries and Ponzi schemes, apocalyptic visions, a yearning for exile, and many other phenomena. Bringing together social, political, religious, and economic viewpoints, the book reveals not one but multiple prospects for the future of Africa. In doing so, it offers a pathbreaking model of pluralistic and open-ended thinking and a powerful tool for addressing the vexing uncertainties that underlie so many futures around the world.

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Africanizing Oncology

Creativity, Crisis, and Cancer in Uganda

Marissa Mika

Ohio University Press, 2021

An innovative contemporary history that blends insights from a variety of disciplines to highlight how a storied African cancer institute has shaped lives and identities in postcolonial Uganda. Over the past decade, an increasingly visible crisis of cancer in Uganda has made local and international headlines. Based on transcontinental research and public engagement with the Uganda Cancer Institute that began in 2010, Africanizing Oncology frames the cancer hospital as a microcosm of the Ugandan state, as a space where one can trace the lived experiences of Ugandans in the twentieth century. Ongoing ethnographic fieldwork, patient records, oral histories, private papers from US oncologists, American National Cancer Institute records, British colonial office reports, and even the architecture of the institute itself show how Ugandans understood and continue to shape ideas about national identity, political violence, epidemics, and economic life. Africanizing Oncology describes the political, social, technological, and biomedical dimensions of how Ugandans created, sustained, and transformed this institute over the past half century. With insights from science and technology studies and contemporary African history, Marissa Mika’s work joins a new wave of contemporary histories of the political, technological, moral, and intellectual aspirations and actions of Africans after independence. It contributes to a growing body of work on chronic disease and situates the contemporary urgency of the mounting cancer crisis on the continent in a longer history of global cancer research and care. With its creative integration of African studies, science and technology studies, and medical anthropology, Africanizing Oncology speaks to multiple scholarly communities.

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After the Crisis

Contemporary States of Photography

Edited by Donatien Grau and Christoph Wiesner

Diaphanes, 2019

After the Crisis offers a platform for discussions between some of today’s leading artists, writers, theorists, curators, and historians aimed at questioning the very status of photography today. Contributors come from the realms of critical theory, fiction, performance art, fashion photography, and museums, as well as film and design, and their conversations bring together history and the contemporary. Comparing the current situation of photographic images with the crisis experienced by representation at the time of the birth of photography, they set our relationship with photographic images in the digital era in perspective. Through these discussions, we come to sense the existential burden of being surrounded by images, while also beginning to grasp the historical depth of a questioning of images that started long before the current generation and engages with crucial political and cultural issues of our time.

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AIDS

Crisis in Professional Ethics

edited by Elliot D. Cohen and Michael Davis

Temple University Press, 1994

Do patients have the right to know their physician's HIV status?

Can a dentist refuse treatment to an HIV-positive patient?

How do educators determine whether to allow an HIV-positive child to attend school, and if they do, should the parents of other children be informed?

Should a counselor break confidentiality by disclosing to a wife that her husband is infected with HIV?

This collection of original essays carefully examines the difficult moral choices the AIDS pandemic has presented for many professionals—physicians, nurses, dentists, teachers and school administrators, business managers, psychotherapists, lawyers, clergy, journalists, and politicians. In the workplace, problems posed by HIV and AIDS have led to a reexamination of traditional codes of ethics. Providing systematic and reasoned discussions, the authors explore the moral, legal, and ethical issues involved in the reconsideration of policies, standards of conduct, and the practicality of balancing personal and professional ethics.

Contributors: Albert Flores, Joan C. Callahan, Jill Powell, Kenneth Kipnis, Al Gini, Howard Cohen, Martin Gunderson, Joseph A. Edelheit, Michael Pritchard, Vincent J. Samar, Sohair ElBaz, William Pardue, and the editors.

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Amythia

Crisis in the Natural History of Western Culture

Loyal D. Rue

University of Alabama Press, 1989

A provocative analysis of the ways our culture suffers amythia

Amythia results when cosmology and morality are not effectively integrated by a root metaphor, and the only possibility for the future is to transpose the old Christian God as Person to a root metaphor that is even older in origin, the concept of the Covenant tradition inherited from Israel but now understood in a nonsupernaturalist manner.

Rue asserts that amythia is a critical condition within the natural history of Western culture. The argument of the book begins with a theoretical perspective on the place of human culture within the scope of natural history and proceeds to establish the conceptual foundations for a natural history of culture.

Following an overview of the natural history of Western culture to expose the origins and depth of the contemporary intellectual and moral crisis, Rue moves on to specify and justify the limits of distinctiveness and plausibility appropriate for the task of transposing Covenant tradition. Finally, an appeal is made to the mythmakers of contemporary culture to take up the challenge of amythia.

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Animals and Death

Hunting, Modernity, and the Crisis of the Wild

Charles Stépanoff

HAU, 2026

From pets to prey to food, the hierarchy of animals' relationship to humans has profound anthropological and ecological implications.

Modernity has divided animals into two categories: those deemed worthy of protection and affection, and those reduced to raw material for industry. How can we make sense of this strange split between protective love and intensive exploitation? Hunting, which both predates this opposition and continues to unsettle it, provides an exceptional vantage point from which to examine our contradictory relationship with living beings in the midst of an ecological crisis. Drawing on an immersive field study, Charles Stépanoff documents the accelerated erosion of rural biodiversity, and the paradoxical relationships between hunting, protection, and compassion. Over the course of this rich journey, he sheds new light on the anthropological and ecological foundations of the violence inflicted on living beings, as well as on the wild origins of political sovereignty. Ultimately, by questioning the peculiar moral hierarchy that this violence produces today, Stépanoff gives our moral and emotional perception a deeper field of vision.

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Apostolic Religious Life in America Today

A Response to the Crisis

Richard Gribble

Catholic University of America Press, 2011

Divided into two parts, this volume first presents an analysis of the problem and secondly a solution to place apostolic religious life on a positive trajectory in the 21st century.

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Art and the Crisis of Marriage

Edward Hopper and Georgia O'Keeffe

Vivien Green Fryd

University of Chicago Press, 2002

Between the two world wars, middle-class America experienced a "marriage crisis" that filled the pages of the popular press. Divorce rates were rising, birthrates falling, and women were entering the increasingly industrialized and urbanized workforce in larger numbers than ever before, while Victorian morals and manners began to break down in the wake of the first sexual revolution.

Vivien Green Fryd argues that this crisis played a crucial role in the lives and works of two of America's most familiar and beloved artists, Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) and Edward Hopper (1882-1967). Combining biographical study of their marriages with formal and iconographical analysis of their works, Fryd shows how both artists expressed the pleasures and perils of their relationships in their paintings. Hopper's many representations of Victorian homes in sunny, tranquil landscapes, for instance, take on new meanings when viewed in the context of the artist's own tumultuous marriage with Jo and the widespread middle-class fears that the new urban, multidwelling homes would contribute to the breakdown of the family. Fryd also persuasively interprets the many paintings of skulls and crosses that O'Keeffe produced in New Mexico as embodying themes of death and rebirth in response to her husband Alfred Stieglitz's long-term affair with Dorothy Norman.

Art and the Crisis of Marriage provides both a penetrating reappraisal of the interconnections between Georgia O'Keeffe's and Edward Hopper's lives and works, as well as a vivid portrait of how new understandings of family, gender, and sexuality transformed American society between the wars in ways that continue to shape it today.

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Athens 415

The City in Crisis

Clara Shaw Hardy, with translations by Robert B. Hardy

University of Michigan Press, 2020

On a summer night in 415 BCE, unknown persons systematically mutilated most of the domestic “herms”—guardian statues of the god Hermes—in Athens. The reaction was immediate and extreme: the Athenians feared a terrifying conspiracy was underway against the city and its large fleet—and possibly against democracy itself. The city established a board of investigators, which led to informants, accusations, and flight by many of the accused. Ultimately, dozens were exiled or executed, their property confiscated.

This dramatic period offers the opportunity to observe the city in crisis. Sequential events allow us to see the workings of the major institutions of the city (assembly, council, law courts, and theater, as well as public and private religion). Remarkably, the primary sources for these tumultuous months name conspirators and informants from a very wide range of status-groups: citizens, women, slaves, and free residents. Thus the incident provides a particularly effective entry-point into a full multifaceted view of the way Athens worked in the late fifth century.

Designed for classroom use, Athens 415 is no potted history, but rather a source-based presentation of ancient urban life ideal for the study of a people and their institutions and beliefs. Original texts—all translated by poet Robert B. Hardy—are presented along with thoughtful discussion and analyses by Clara Shaw Hardy in an engaging narrative that draws students into Athens’ crisis.

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