This chapter examines the national-scale origins and political linkages of land mafias and rural militias in Brazil. These linkages, especially to political power, explain how, over just a few decades, an RDPE of active and open land-grabbing mafias has spread from southern Brazil to the Amazon. These cases illustrate the dynamics by which federal-level changes can expand an RDPE system to the national scale and to other parts of the same jurisdiction, polity, and political system. The land-grabbing process is linked to illegalities and violence, which are mutually self-reinforcing through the logics operating in these systems. This chapter examines the rapid post-2019 transformation of pastures into monoculture soybean or corn plantations, especially in southeastern Acre and along the paved BR-163 highway. Part of the problem is the institutionalization of illegal land grabbing and its mafia-like tactics, whose continuation is ensured through legal loopholes and ambiguities. The situation worsened, especially during the reign of Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2023), as land mafia dynamics penetrated deeper into the sociopolitical fabric of Brazil.

Chapter 1 analyzes the recordkeeping practices established in Kenya during the Emergency through the reorganization of colonial intelligence services. This chapter explores the connection between the British paranoia against Mau Mau fighters in particular and Kikuyu-speaking peoples in general and the administration’s anxious obsession with recordkeeping and the maintenance of Emergency secrets. Following a discussion of key terms and contexts, such as the colonial concept of information management and the Emergency period, this chapter situates the “migrated archives” in the colonial politics of concealment.

This chapter analyzes the infrastructure of medical services and situates Arab doctors within this grid. The British Department of Health, on the one hand, was a significant employer, employing 25 to 35 percent of all Palestinian physicians at any given time. On the other hand, these doctors had minimal impact on decision-making: British medical officers occupied the top administrative echelons, restricting local medical professionals’ autonomy and career prospects and preventing the formation of a proto-state medical infrastructure. The chapter examines the tension between pressure from the Colonial Office to limit expenditure and pressure from Palestinian civil society to expand services. It then looks at Palestinian physicians’ working conditions at the department and Palestinian demands to improve medical services. The chapter concludes with attempts made by the department’s last director to remedy its ills during the final two years of the British Mandate.

Experiencing emotions is part of human nature and our daily life. Sometimes, emotions can be too intense and we need or want to control them. Emotion regulation (ER) is a term that describes management of emotional experiences, regardless of whether we downregulate negative emotions or upregulate positive ones. Conscious, cognitive efforts to regulate an emotion have been subsumed under this term, as well as unconscious, implicit regulation of emotion. Effective ER has been associated with a number of positive outcomes, such as an increased general well-being, improved performance at work and in personal and professional relations, and, most importantly, enhanced mental and physical health. In contrast, deficits in ER are observed in severe psychological disorders, such as depression and anxiety. Consequently, understanding the neural underpinnings of ER has become one of the most popular topics in affective neuroscience throughout the last two decades.

This first chapter provides an introduction to the book as well as outlining some of its major themes and issues. It provides a general outline of the theory of conscience defended in the book.

This chapter focuses on the domain of the vegetative soul that represents some of the simplest activities that distinguish the organic from the inorganic. It examines the central vegetative system consisting of the liver, the veins and their supporting organs, as well as the vegetative capacities present in all the tissues that are subservient to this system. The chapter not only discusses the relationship between the central parts and capacities in all of the body, but also examines the ways in which these capacities manifest themselves, arguing they represent Galen’s attempts to grapple with the notion of basic vitality. On some occasions, Galen also calls them ‘demiurgic’, implying a creative capacity. A discussion of how he engages with the pre-existing philosophical tradition and the notion of a biological demiurge helps to delineate the scope of these capacities.

The last decade of Hemingway’s life is characterized by the culmination of his recognition as a great writer and, at the same time, by a diminution of his writerly power. During that decade, Hemingway continued to write prolifically and to be recognized for his literary achievements. His thematic preoccupations remained consistent; he continued to write on bullfighting (a substantial article for Life magazine) and on big-game hunting and sport fishing (including The Old Man and the Sea, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novella). The chapter also assesses the novels and nonfiction books published after Hemingway’s death in 1961: A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream, and Garden of Eden. With the possible exception of A Moveable Feast, the extent to which these books should be read as “books by Ernest Hemingway” is debatable. The author was famous for the work of condensation and cutting that characterized his revision process absent from the final preparation of their manuscripts. In the strongest passages of all of this work, Hemingway is able to thematize the exhaustion and belatedness that he seems to have been struggling against, so that even the failed work offers rewards to the careful reader.

When thinking about emotional expressions, most would probably envision facial expressions (e.g., smiling, scowling) or vocalizations (e.g., crying, laughter). Here we focus on the emotional postures and movements of the body – an important, but fairly understudied, signal for emotion perception. During emotional episodes, humans often position and move their bodies in consistent ways that may (or may not) signal their underlying feelings and future actions. We briefly review the historical antecedents of this literature, as well as current knowledge on the neural processing, developmental trajectory, and cultural differences in the emotional perception of body language. We continue by examining the role of the body as a contextualizing agent for disambiguating facial expressions, as well as their inverse relationship – from faces to bodies. Future directions and speculations about how this emerging field may evolve are discussed.

The joint centre of this book is Europe and the Middle East, because the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries CE marked what I would call an era of global contact. It was during this time that a series of interlocking conflicts enmeshing the Christian and Islamic civilisations that started with the conquest of Iberia in the eighth century and continued through the Crusades to the Ottoman wars of the early modern period shaped and expanded both Europe and the Middle East. At the same time, Europe and the Middle East explored and expanded into Asia, Africa, and eventually North America. I combine Europe and the Middle East into one cultural entity because for all their differences, the longue durée stresses the shared logocentric tradition of the Abrahamic faiths, the common heritage in science and philosophy, and the centuries of interwoven experiences, often painful and violent, but just as often culturally enriching and mutually beneficial. And while the political entities of medieval Europe play a more significant role in structuring this book than other areas, there are attempts to balance this by foregrounding the role of literatures and writers from other parts of the world.